No Optimism Required; Hope Is Powerful

"Hope is a practice."
— Mariame Kaba

I describe myself as a "pragmatic optimist", meaning that I know I need to put in the work, I'm willing to accept incremental progress as progress, and I do believe we can move toward something better through our commitment and effort. Optimism is defined by some as a less than useful position because they conceive of it as a belief that you already know the outcome will be positive. I'm not that kind of optimist. I don't wait for the best possible outcome; I work for it. Maybe I'm an optimistic pragmatist instead.

I've been publishing the occasional round-up of poems on a theme. This one is a bit different. I collect quotations, and this collection includes quite a few of those as well as links to some poems. I'm putting together sources about hope in the spirit of the quotation from Jane Goodall and the poem below from Barbara Kingsolver, both of them women whose work and spirit I admire. 

I hope you find inspiration here.

Quotations

"Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement."
— Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope

"Hope is not a wish but an intention."
— Steven Charleston

"...it’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say, you know, feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present… The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world — because it will not be healed without that. That [is] what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world." 
— Joanna Macy in an On Being episode  discovered thanks to this Brain Pickings post on Macy, Rainer Maria Rilke, and mortality

And then there's this:
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone." 
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
— Howard Zinn, "The Optimism of Uncertainty" (2004)

"Hope is an act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and a culture of despair that depends on us not being able to imagine something better than where we are now."
— Rabbi Sharon Brous

“This is my hope: that the recognition of shared fate might cause us to act  as if shared fate is the reality that in fact it is.” 
—Jane Hirshfield

"Life is full of mystery. The mystery is our invitation to let go and to embrace uncertainty with the fullness of our being. This is how hope becomes our bearing. It’s how it becomes our compass in uncertain times." 
—Joe Primo

"We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith— only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer." 
—Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

"Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, and each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two."
— Parker J. Palmer

"ln a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world. Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reverse truth. It lives open-eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be." 
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

"Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is."
— Vaclav Havel

Poems

"Hope; An Owner's Manual"
Barbara Kingsolver

Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.



Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

"Hope"
Barbara Crooker

A thin drizzle of sun slips through clouds, a strand of hope against the icy odds.

"How to Hope"
Katherine Harer

hope is hokey
imperfect full of stumbling little acts

the way a strand of neighbors standing in the rain
on the shoulder of Highway One American flags
in their hands and homemade signs:
Peace is Patriotic
can make another strand start up
even in the imagination

"Hope (A Zen Perspective)"
Richard Schiffman

Hope is not about some future meadow.
Hope is not a triumphal march toward some brighter,
bloodless field. Neither is it lighting a candle
or cursing the darkness or calling the glass half full.
It is this half-empty tumbler turning cartwheels
above the chasm.  

"There Was a Time I Disdained Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And isn’t
that what hope
is—a sprout
that grows
when conditions
are poor,
as if to prove

"Thanks, Robert Frost"
David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...

"Relearning Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope was never meant to be trapped,
to be tamed, commodified, it was always
meant to flow through. 

"A Poem on Hope" (video of Berry reading it in an interview with Bill Moyers)
Wendell Berry

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

Somewhat related reading


*Links in book titles are Bookshop.org affiliate links. Go to your local independent bookstore or get the book from the library. The links are here in case you need them. Any proceeds will be donated to nonprofits advancing hope, social justice, and safer streets for all of us.


Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Tomato Jammin'

Today's theme song: Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Jamming."

What to do with home-grown tomatoes that's more interesting than making canned tomatoes that you can buy from the store? Tomato jam, that's what. (I do lots of things with tomatoes, actually, but never, ever ketchup.)

For the past three years I've made the Food In Jars Smoky Spicy Skillet Tomato Jam, in much larger quantities than her recipe. I really love it, so much so that I still have some left from last year. So this year's tomato crop went into two other recipes.

Orange Tomato Jam: Yield from 10 cups of chopped tomatoes: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints.

A couple of years ago I created Citrus Tomato Marmalade because the recipe title had made me think something called Orange Tomato Jam must surely have a citrus element. I didn't grow enough orange tomatoes that year to make an orange tomato jam. The marmalade turned out pretty good, although it was super sweet.

This year, though, my word, the Orange Brandywine! (A Hobbitish name, that.) Tomatoes bigger than my hand and lots of them. I ate plenty and stashed a bunch more in the freezer along with Hillbilly, an orange tomato with red shoulders.

When I tasted this jam as it reached the early jammy stage, I felt the spices needed a bit of oomphing up, possibly because I used ginger paste from a tube rather than freshly grated. Added 1/2 t. paprika and ~1 t. ginger paste. That brought it up to Resident Taste Tester-approved levels of a gentle heat. So I added another 1/8 t. cayenne. 

Bright orange tomato jam in a blue Dutch oven with white interior.

Tomato Jam: Yield from around 6 pounds of tomatoes, some with a firmer flesh than others: 4 half-pints, 10 quarter-pints, and a couple of tablespoons left over so guess I'll just have to have that with some cheese and crackers.

This recipe from Serious Eats uses cumin, cinnamon, and crushed red pepper for its seasoning. I ran out of crushed red pepper flakes, but luckily cayenne pepper is a good substitute. Not 1:1 though! More like 1/2:1 cayenne:crushed red pepper, then taste and adjust. As it approached the jammy stage I tasted and decided I want a bit more cumin presence. I added 1/4 t., then another 1/4 t., then figured I'd better stop since I wasn't going for a straight-up Mexican flavor. I'd forgotten I made it back in 2024. Since each year I grow a slightly different mix of tomatoes, each year's jam will be its own taste sensation.

Close-up photo of a small canning jar with dark red tomato jam inside.

The eternal tomato skins question: To remove completely or do something else? 

They don't "dissolve into the jam," as a different tomato jam recipe promised. They show up as little shreds. I don't mind them; they can't be more fibrous than blackberry seeds. They're not that aesthetically pleasing, though.

For the orange tomatoes I took a chance and learned that indeed, their skins don't melt. I kept my kitchen scissors handy and kept snipping longer shreds into smaller bits as they surfaced in the pot.

For the red tomatoes I took a different approach. I had (yet again) not blanched and removed skins as I threw tomatoes in the freezer in the peak harvest season. If I'd taken the skins off when they were fresh I could have tried making tomato powder. I didn't, though.

The skins slide off pretty easily after freezing for most tomato varieties, although I learned the giant meaty Amish red tomatoes I grew this year like to hold onto their skins even after freezing. 

I slid off as many as I could and threw them in the food processor for some serious smashing. Out of around 6 pounds of tomatoes this yielded nearly two cups of tomato-y paste, well worth the effort to extract all possible flavor from the fruit.

I also used the food processor to pulse the fresh tomatoes and those Amish (which really hold up beautifully to freezing!). The frozen San Marzano and Black Prince pretty much fell apart so they were jam-ready right out of the freezer. Yes, recipes refer to chopped tomatoes. In the past I've spent a long time at the chopping board with a knife. Then I realized I was putting a lot of care into chopping things that were going to cook down and lose their shape. You know what a food processor does, used carefully with pulses? It chops tomatoes.

Stovetop with a big canning kettle in the center, blue Dutch oven to the right with orange tomato jam, two silver kettles to the left.

Related reading and recipes


Posted
Themes: , No comments :

Autumnal Equinox 2026: Thoughts and Readings

I'm thinking about the idea of the equinox: 24 hours supposedly* divided evenly between day and night, happening twice a year. Half of one, half another, and yet that isn't at all how we experience day or night. My day starts when I wake up, ends when I fall into sleep. This time of year night, meaning darkness falling, begins before I sleep, and I definitely go to sleep more than 12 hours after I awaken. The Latin roots may mean "equal night"—aequus (equal) plus nox (night)—but that doesn't mean we divide our energies equally between day and night or that I rest as much as I wake.

And yet, and yet—

These astronomical grace notes of the year give us reason to pause. Reason to recognize we live within larger and larger spheres. We may pause within our minds, yet we're always moving even when we're standing still, riding atop an earth spinning on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour (1,040 at the equator) and whirling around the sun at 67,100 miles per hour. The Sun and Earth orbit the center of our galaxy at something like 447,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving. Everything is moving. We are never, ever still. Or we are both still and moving, half and half.

The ancient Celts (who provided some of my ancestry), the Mayans and others used the wheel to symbolize or track time and the seasons. We now enter the season of Mabon (a name given to it in the 1970s, not an ancient traditional name). This is a time of harvest, balance, reflection, releasing what we don't need as we approach the dark. A site on the pagan or Wiccan calendar tells me "the ancient Mayans designed Chichen Itzá to mark the equinox sun, while Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples built sites like Carin T in Ireland and Mnajdra in Malta that align with the sunrise on this day." The Goddess moves from Mother to Crone, a journey I'm taking over the decades although the role of Mother stays with me always.

This is harvest season. My shelves are lined with row upon row of jars, jams, jellies, and chutneys, apples making a prominent appearance thanks to an unexpected gift from a stranger. The ground may be cold, the skies grey, as we move toward winter, but blackberry, elderberry, cherry, hot peppers, mint, tomatoes, and other sweet or savory flavors will join freshly baked brown bread on my plate. This comfort food rewards my labor planting, tending, picking, gleaning, cooking, canning, kneading, shaping, baking. I learned this from my parents, who stocked basement shelves and freezer through summer and fall to lay up stores for the cold season. Measuring time by what ripens, what is past, tells me when summer is turning toward fall.

Emergence Magazine provides me with seasonal meditations. These ask that we pay attention, real attention, to the changes in the world around us. This time of year I both see and feel the change in the angle of the light over the course of the day. Seasonal practice #29, "Slanted Light: for when the sun is slung low," speaks to this:

"Place yourself in a patch of shallow sunshine. What hush does this low light bring to the landscape? How is each space listening to the changing of the light? While the glare and warmth of summer feel like an out-breath, this muted, shallow quality of light is like an in-breath. In long shadows and pale hues, what retreats?"

Then there is #38, "Falling Leaves: for when a colorful carpet adorns the ground":

"Lie down in a pile of fallen leaves. Touch them. Smell them. Are they damp, spiced, sweet with the smell of rot? Imagine the cycle of decay and renewal taking place right beneath you—the leaves slowly breaking down, becoming soil. How do you feel this cycle present within you at this moment: what parts of yourself do you feel called to shed and transform in order for new growth to begin?"

I happened across a piece on the idea of knitting the wheel of the year, each season suggesting different projects, different weights of yarn for the changing daylight and temperatures. As a knitter I love this idea of settling into the season as I settle into my chair with yarn and needles (and a woolsucking cat who needs to be kept far, far away from my tasty bag of merino cat snacks).

My hemisphere of the Earth begins to tilt away from the Sun, taking us from warmth into cold, from light into more and more darkness. The leaves reveal their true colors, the scarlet and gold and orange there all along beneath the green of chlorophyll. I gather leaves on my walks and arrange them in patterns by my door, my "leafspedition land art" decorating the earth for a few days before becoming earth. Like the leaves, I settle into what I am becoming, the yarn in my hands becoming something new.

*I say the equinox is supposedly an equal division between day and night because the equilux, the actual half-and-half division, happens a few days after the equinox, much to my surprise. The Farmer's Almanac explains:

"The Latin root says “equal night,” but the day of the equinox is not actually the day day and night come out exactly even at most places. That day is the equilux, and in the Northern Hemisphere it falls a few days after the September equinox. Two effects pull the dates apart: the Sun is a disc, not a point, so sunrise begins the moment the top edge clears the horizon, and Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight, letting us see the Sun slightly before it rises and slightly after it sets.

Together those effects add several minutes of daylight to the equinox day. For most of the continental United States, the equilux in 2026 lands between September 25 and 27, with northern states reaching equal day and night a day or two earlier than southern ones. After that, the night side runs ahead, and the days shorten in earnest."

It seems to me, then, that we may think we see balance even though it actually falls somewhere else, perhaps a bit later and in a different place than we thought. We may find our balance standing still while moving faster than we can imagine, watching the light change and the leaves fall.

"Equinox"
Richard Wehrman

The Garden releases its last
radiance, not as something failed,
but as its full reason for being: to give
continually, to its last bit of energetic being.
Its giving is its beauty. It is a smile,
it is the heart of love.

“Autumn”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,
as if, far off in the heavens, gardens were wilting.
And as they fall, their gestures say "it's over."
In the night the heavy earth is falling
from out of all the stars into loneliness.
We are all falling. This hand here is falling.
Just look: it is in all of us.
Yet there is one who holds this falling
with infinite tenderness in her hands.

"Natural History"
Sam Hamill

                    May she
be happy, filled
with the essential,
working in the twilight,
on her knees, at autumn equinox,
gathering the stories
of silence together,
preparing to meet the winter.

"Autumnal Equinox"
Terri Kirby Erickson

Autumn
shakes the summer
from our minds until it falls like leaves,
skittering down an empty street.

Related reading

Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Apple Mint Jelly Yet Again: The Ratios with Fresh Apples

Making jam or jelly is always an exercise in math if you're not following a recipe precisely. For apple mint jelly the question becomes whether I have enough mint on hand to flavor a given quantity of apples. This set of instructions helps you calculate proportions based on what you have.

X = Cups of mint leaves and stems, chopped (yes, you can use the stems, which also carry the minty goodness; I leave out ones that are very thick and woody)

2X = Pounds of apples, quartered, not cored or peeled because you want to keep the pectin, and including any skins or cores you have from other appley goodness you're working on to provide extra pectin, although it can't be all skins/cores because then you won't have apple flesh to extract juice and flavor from

2X = Cups of liquid: Water, or half water and half white vinegar

If this fills an entire stockpot, split it into two so the cooking goes more efficiently.

Bring apples, liquid and mint to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until apples turn to a soft mush, approximately 20 minutes. Mash it all up a bit with a potato masher

Set the apples and liquid to drain in a jelly strainer set-up or a sieve lined with cheesecloth set over a big bowl. Do not press on the solids. When you do that you end up with cloudy jelly because you pushed some solids into the juice. Let the mash sit for several hours or overnight to get every possible drop with the help of gravity.

Your labors and time yield a given amount of juice. Some recipes will tell you to add water to get to a specific number of cups. Why on why would you dilute the delicious juice you just made? Don't do that.

Your final math problems: 

  • For each cup of juice, add 7/8 cup of white sugar. This is 3/4 of a cup plus 2 tablespoons.
  • For each 2 cups of juice, add 2 T. lemon juice 
You can figure out smaller proportions where you fall short of a full cup or you can accept that cooking is improv, start with a baseline that rounds down rather than up because you can't unsugar something, and taste the juice at some point as it cooks.

I did this the other day and ended up with 6 cups of minty apple juice. That yielded 3 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints of jelly. 

I probably skimmed off another quarter-pint of foam from the top to create nice clear jelly. That foam doesn't go to waste at our house; I put it in a little jar that goes in the fridge to be eaten as scrap jelly. It tastes good; it's just not ready for its close-up.

Related reading





Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Poetry and Place

A story with a happy ending, brought to me by poetry:

I had the great good fortune to go on a family trip to England last year, with a stop in Wales. In a bookstore in Caernarvon I picked up a book of poetry, This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells. 

She's following in the footsteps of an earlier Welsh poet, John Clare, who wrote about the effects of the Enclosure Act. Howells' poems describe Clyne Common in loving detail, from the plants and creatures to the people fighting to save it from development. Wales has a national law protecting spaces that hold endangered species and they're trying to preserve their commons, but this one was owned by an English lord who wanted to develop it.

I read the book over the course of a few weeks, resisting the urge to find out what actually happened in the legal battle. I finished the book, read the beautiful last poem "Jays in Love", and promptly searched on "Clyne Commons legal battle."

They won! They saved the commons! Many, many people fought to save it and won.

It isn't that this book of poetry necessarily turned the tide. But it brought me so much joy to know that this place she observed so closely and described so beautifully is still there. The scrubby land the lord had offered up as "replacement value" is a perfectly good place to put houses, since housing is a real need. You can build houses without destroying irreplaceable habitat. And the people who live in those houses can enjoy and appreciate the commons that will still be there, living and breathing. 

Reading the first lines of that article moved me to tears. People loving a place and caring and fighting for it can and do make a real difference in the world.

This story of place has extra resonance for me because my maternal grandfather was of Welsh descent, although I have no idea which part of Wales his family originally came from. Welsh mythology has always appealed to me, and in college as a linguistics major I took a semester of Middle Welsh. Going to Wales meant riding on a train that announced stops first in Welsh, then in English, and hearing Welsh spoken as the primary language in the bookstore where I got this book and a new translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythology I read as a child.

I want more poetry of place. If it's coupled with a victory for the planet, so much the better. Know of any?

Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Elderberry Jam JK Jelly Because Raccoons

This is neither a jam recipe nor a jelly recipe. It's a jam-into-jelly story and you should not do with your elderberries what I did with mine.

That said, I will go on to say that the jelly turned out fabulous. It's the perfect texture for my jelly tastes: soft and pourable, but at a slow pace, not a runny liquid that didn't really set. It's a glorious deep purple color and it tastes good.


Now for the story. 

One August night as I read in bed I heard a lot of noise outside, like something breaking bushes or wood. What on earth was it?! I didn’t think a human intruder would be that noisy so after a few seconds I had my suspicions.

I turned out my lamp and looked outside. Couldn’t see a thing even after my eyes adjusted. Turned on my phone’s flashlight and shone it out through the screen. Couldn’t see a thing. Put on my robe and sneakers and went outside, where I discovered a mama raccoon who was BREAKING my elderberry bushes’ branches to get at the ripe berries! I had guessed raccoon but the woody noise had been a bit of a mystery since we don’t have a brush pile out there.

She made a very ominous low rumbling sound. I realized why a second later, as an immature raccoon edged past me on the fence about three feet away. She was clearly saying “Don’t you dare hurt my baby!” I won’t, Mama, but get away from my berries! Once the baby made its way to her we had a staredown for a few minutes. She backed slowly away but didn’t really want to go. Even after I turned off my flashlight I could see glowing eyes watching me, the mama’s eyes higher than the eyes of the baby crouched in front of her.

The next morning, some very sad elderberry bushes awaited. I trimmed off one truly broken branch. With a couple more I’m going to try taping them up as if I’d grafted the branch and see what happens. I’d been planning to harvest anyway. Time to make elderberry jam! Or is it?

Photo of a steel container full of bunches of dark purple elderberries still on the stemsElderberry safety warning!

Elderberry canning comes with safety warnings, though. The University of Wisconsin is quite clear on this point. Their "not safe for canning" headline is discouraging, but that's not really what the article tells us. It says weigh ingredients and make sure you add enough acid!

"For Jam, the weight ratio of elderberry pulp to sugar must be no more than: weight of fruit/ weight of sugar = 47/55 = 0.85. For every 16 ounces (1 pound) of fruit pulp for Jam, your recipe must include at least 18.9 ounces, by weight, of sugar. It is not acceptable to use dry measure cups or assume that a 1-cup measure of fruit or sugar weighs 8-ounces, it will not. You must weigh ingredients."

There's more information there about making jelly, adding lemon juice, not using honey, not reducing the sugar ratio. (You can add more than the recipe calls for, never less.) Read the article if you're going to can elderberry jam or jelly. Honestly, this makes me wish I'd chosen a different food-producing plant for that corner. After the Incident of the Raccoons in the Night, I'm actually thinking about pulling out the bushes (I planted one and it sent out a volunteer so I have two) and putting in something else. Probably also raccoon-tempting, but more conducive to canning.

Elderberry Jam

I had 4.75 pounds of elderberries after all the cleaning, from this saved-from-the-raccoons batch and ones I'd harvested earlier this year and last year. Elderberries keep coming on so it's a while before you're done with them.

Cleaning tricks: Freeze them first. Hold the stem over a big bowl and geeeently run a fork down the twigs. Berries will pop off. Some of the annoyingly minuscule stems will too, and you need to pick out as many of those as you can spot.

My rooky error at this point! I forgot that when you double a jam recipe you really add to the cooking time before reaching the jelling stage. You're (I'm) better off making two smaller batches rather than one big batch. Uh-oh. I'm committed now, though, because at this point I'm using my Dutch oven to cook the batch of apple hot pepper jelly. I made the juice yesterday and left it to drain overnight and I already had it on the stove. So now I can't split this batch.

With the University of Wisconsin guidelines in mind, and an online percentage calculator to do the math for me, I worked out that 4.75 pounds was 85% of 5.58 pounds. Round up, not down! 5.75 pounds of sugar it is. Got a bit edgy here: I used 5 pounds of white sugar, .75 pounds of brown sugar, after checking that it is indeed okay to substitute. I wanted that slightly caramel edge that brown sugar brings.

How much lemon juice, needed to help it gel since elderberries are low in pectin? The Creative Canning Elderberry Jam recipe gave me a ratio: 1/2 cup of lemon juice is 20% of the 2.5 pounds of elderberries she had. That meant 0.95 cups of lemon juice. Call it a scant cup, filled to the line or a skosh below. (If you measure by the titch instead of by the skosh, that's fine.) 

And now to get a gigantic pot of elderberries to boil....

They do foam up quite nicely, as promised/warned, and I was glad I had them in my deepest stockpot.

Photo of a tall stainless steel pot. In the pot, tiny dark purple berries stirred by a wooden spoon, with a bright red foam appearing on top of the berries in the right half of the kettle.
But after 45 minutes of cooking, stirring often, I still had pretty chewy elderberries. It was getting late, I'd already made the apple hot pepper jelly, I wanted to be done.

Pivoting to Jelly

Again, not the recommended jelly method. I should have cooked the elderberries without sugar, left them to drain overnight, then mixed the juice with sugar and lemon juice. The Extension site also noted that jelly required a higher sugar:fruit ratio than jam and I now didn't have a way to measure that because the sugar was in the jam pot.

Onward. I drained the elderberries in my jellybag strainer, not letting them sit overnight, just waiting for the drips to dwindle to an occasional one rather than a stream. I put the juice in my Dutch oven (clean by now), added another 1/2 cup sugar figuring I'd already rounded up the sugar when I thought I was making jam, brought it to a boil, and let it cook, skimming the foam off. 

I test readiness both with a thermometer for temperature and by dipping some juice, holding the wooden spoon on its side, and watching how the liquid behaves as it runs off. If it's dripping fast like water, it's not ready to jell. If it's in slow syrupy drips, or better yet running together to form more of a sheet, it's ready. I got t his juice to the slow syrupy stage and called it good enough.

Into the jars, into the hot-water bath for 15 minutes, and done.

The next day I opened the one quarter-pint that had come up a tiny bit short when I filled the jars. To my surprise and delight I had gorgeous jelly. A deep purple, a pourable but jelled consistency, and a taste that for me was a lot more rewarding than those chewy, somewhat woody berries. It has an astringency unlike my other jellies but I like it. 

Maybe I don't get rid of those bushes after all. Although I do think next year I'll try elderflower jelly so as to avoid tempting the raccoons.

Again, this is not a recipe. This is what happened because raccoons.

Yield: 5 half-pints, 10 quarter-pints.


Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe

My Hot Pepper Jelly made with a mix of 50% sweet bell peppers, 50% a mix of various mild to hot peppers from the freezer, was a hit in our household. Acquiring a big batch of gleaned apples made me think about creating a variation with an apple base. Could be jam, could be jelly. Getting the gift of peppers from friend Mitzi, a regular Buy Nothing connection, made this an even better idea.

Source recipes

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly, The View from Great Island: Fastest and easiest since it calls for starting with apple juice or apple cider and using red pepper flakes for the heat. Note of caution: Commercial apple juice doesn't have as much pectin as what you make at home, per the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe calls for pectin to make up for that. Parking this for someone who might want a shortcut recipe; I didn't use anything from this.

Apple Jalapeño Jelly, Hola Jalapeño: A recipe developer after my own heart: She made this because she picked a bunch of apples. Her pepper combo sounds pretty hot so I might tame it a bit. Bonus: Cheddar Pie Crust Cracker recipe here too. What a tasty-sounding combo! She goes straight from making juice to straining through a sieve and using it. I know from experience this doesn't produce as much juice as leaving the mash to drain overnight in a jelly bag.

Jalapeño Apple Pepper Jelly, Stemilt: Includes optional addition of cranberries for color and flavor. Someone in the Food in Jars Facebook group suggested cranberry jalapeño jelly a while back so this one is intriguing to make again when I have cranberries on hand. It calls for 3 cups of white vinegar, though, and that sounds too sharp for my taste. It does include a handy ratio I've come across before for jelly: 7/8 c. sugar for each 1 c. juice. This one includes the option of an overnight drip for the juice.

I ended up mostly following the Stemilt recipe despite my misgivings about the vinegar. Hola Jalapeño leaving out the overnight drip won't cut it.

"Feeder" ingredients you could live without:

  • I had some leftover commercial apple cider to use up from a container I'd used to provide liquid for the Salted Caramel Apple Butter and some earlier recipes. I used this in place of the water Stemilt's recipe called for. Hola Jalapeño had noted that commercial apple juice doesn't have the pectin of homemade. 
  • I had a big bunch of peels and cores left over from prepping apples for the Indian Apple Chutne I'd made earlier. I saved them specifically for their pectin contribution and figured that would take care of the potentially lower pectin level in the commercial cider, along with the other apples I quartered and threw in.

Stemilt called for 6 jalapeño, stems and ribs removed to tame 3 of them, 3 of them with stems/ribs left in to hot it up. I went with 5, figuring I'd taste the resulting juice and adjust. This and my 4 pounds of apples, peels and cores with 3 cups of cider, 3-1/2 cups of white vinegar, yielded 3 cups of juice. They suggested adding water to bring it up to 4 cups. I opted to leave the rich flavor I had produced rather than water it down.

The juice seemed just right for heat, but the cooking stage tamed it a bit. Next time I'd go with 6 jalapeños, thinking of it as 2 per cup of juice, and maybe chop one more to provide tiny bits floating in the jelly. I didn't make any chopped pepper bits this time around, opting for the clear (and therefore sneaky) jelly. My Mad Hatter peppers are sweet with only a tiny bit of heat and they're ripe now. They'd add a nice touch of red without the kick of a Fresno or cayenne. Next time!

Yield: 8 quarter-pints

Photo of 3 small quilted glass jars labeled Apple Jalapeño Jelly From the Kitchen of Barb Chamberlain 2026



Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Cran-Rasp-Orange-Berry Jam

Inventing new jam flavor combinations and cleaning the freezer go hand in hand, at least for me. This recipe resulted from having a bag of frozen raspberries from last year's harvest and a container of a cranberry-orange sauce I made for a family meal that produced more than we could eat. I've seen cran-raspberry juice in the store and this seemed like a natural combination. My search for recipe inspiration confirmed the idea.

Two things I think about in jam inventions: naturally occurring pectin in the fruits and berries I'm using, and overall acidity in the recipe for safe canning. I'll read a recipe written for a single ingredient like raspberries to learn whether that jam can set without added pectin. If it can, then something with more natural pectin should marry quite nicely. I don't want to use pectin because I don't want my jam to end up like a block of gelatin.

Two charts I found to help with this particular combination: A UK pectin and acidity chart that doesn't include raspberries(!) and an article from Fruits Knowledge World that focuses on pectin and provides a helpful summary bullet list.

Another handy spot: CoolConversion to calculate how many ounces or grams or cups you have when you have the measurement in some other metric. This came in handy figuring out that my 6 cups of frozen raspberries was just a tad more than the 30 ounces in the Food in Jars recipe below.

Source recipes

  • Cranberry Orange Sauce, A Mindfull Mom (pause your ad blocker for the site to load)
  • Cranberry Raspberry Jam, Food in Jars: Genuinely didn't find this until after I had my frozen sources defrosted and was working on ratios. She uses fresh cranberries with frozen raspberries.
Ingredients
  • Cranberry Orange Sauce, 2 cups. If you don't have this on hand, follow the Food in Jars Cranberry Raspberry Jam recipe and add the orange zest, OJ concentrate, cinnamon and nutmeg from the sauce recipe
  • Frozen raspberries, 6 cups, which is close to the 30 oz. in the Food in Jars recipe
  • White sugar, 2-1/2 cups
  • Triple Sec or other orange-flavored liqueur, 2-4 T. (optional)

Defrost the frozen ingredients. What you do next depends on whether you're starting with fresh or frozen cranberries instead of the sauce, which has already been cooked and has broken down the cranberry skins.

If all ingredients are whole, not precooked, mix them with the sugar and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to medium heat and cook. If you're starting with the leftover cranberry orange sauce, you could give the raspberries 10 minutes of cook time, then add the sauce. Doesn't hurt to just dump it all in and start, though.

Stir frequently until the jam thickens, approximately 25-27 minutes total. 

Toward the end of the cook time, stir in the Triple Sec if you're adding it. It doesn't add a strong orange flavor; I just find it fun to add, but it isn't needed. Taste and adjust. Spices don't affect food safety or canning time. Do you want a stronger hint of cloves? Another spoon of OJ concentrate or more orange zest?

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Process the jars in a boiling water bath, starting the timer when the water returns to a full boil after you lower the jars in.

Yield: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

I usually include pictures of beautiful jars full of deliciousness. This time I'm showing some of the wreckage from running a jam batch alongside an applesauce batch.



. 




Posted
Themes: , No comments :

Plum Jam Spice-Plus Recipe

Food in Jars provides a lot of great recipes for small-batch canning. I often size up because I have a bunch of something. Sometimes I have less than the quantity called for and adjust a recipe down rather than up. That was the case with the Spiced Plum Jam. I had some frozen plums, a few fresh, and a handful or two of honeyberries I threw in to use them up.

Ratios are my friend here. Fruit:sugar 1:1? No problem. Scaling spices down can be tricky if I end up with something like 1/3 teaspoon. I round down and taste since it's easy to add, impossible to take away. I look at how much lemon juice the recipe calls for as a contribution to pectin. 

But wait...

Two source recipes:

  • Spiced Plum Jam: Fruit:Sugar 4 lbs:4 cups. 1 lemon juice/zest, which means 2 T. juice. 1-1/2 t. cinnamon and 1/2 t. nutmeg, so 2 t. total spice for this quantity of plums.
  • Plum Jam with Cardamom: Fruit:Sugar 5 lbs.:4 cups. 2 T. lemon juice, 1 t. cardamom
Higher sugar ratio in recipe #1, higher spice too, and I want to combine these because I love all three spices and they mesh well.

I also have 2.75 pounds of plums plus honeyberries. Some of those plums are a bit on the green side.

Pro tip: If you're going to freeze a bunch of plums with plans for future jam, dice them first. When I defrosted my plums I had plum mush. I ended up using kitchen scissors to cut them into chunks in a bowl. This felt harder than chopping them quickly last fall would have.
Plum Jam Spice-Plus, No Pectin

The "plus" here could be adjusting the spice profile to suit your taste. Spice proportions don't affect the jelling process. It could also represent throwing in something besides plums if, like me, you have a small amount of something to use up.

Plums are relatively high in pectin. Between that and the use of lemon juice, you shouldn't need pectin to get a set.
  • Plums (plus): 2.75-3 pounds of pitted plums, sliced into thin half moons or chopped
  • Sugar: 2.75 pounds
  • Lemon juice: 2 T.
  • Cinnamon: 1 t.
  • Cardamom: 1/2 t.
  • Nutmeg: 1/4 t.
  • Cloves: Dash

Mix plums and sugar in a nonreactive bowl or post and let them sit for an hour or more to macerate. You could do this the night before if you remember. I didn't. It's fine. Honestly, if you forgot completely just start. 

Stir the spices together in a small dish, then sprinkle a bit and stir into the plums, sprinkle and stir, sprinkle and stir, until you've blended in all the spices. This extra step gives you more even distribution of the flavors. 

Alternatively, you can mix the spices into the sugar and add them all together.

Add the lemon juice. 

Cooking: Bring the ingredients to a boil over high heat, stirring. Lower to medium-high heat and cook at a low boil for 30-35 minutes, until the plums soften and the syrup thickens. When you hold the spoon up on its side, the syrup will run down in slow drips that run together rather than liquidy waterlike drops.

Canning set-up: Prep your canning jars and equipment. When you're ready to start cooking it's a good time to put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get the big canning pot of water started heating up.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight (which means not screwed super tight because air needs to be able to escape). 

Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water. 

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 3 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints

Related reading and recipes






Posted
Themes: , No comments :

Heating It Up: Hot Pepper Jelly and Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

I really love a sweet/hot combo, don't you? Or sweet/tangy, for when I go deep on chutney. I've had a couple of bags of peppers in the freezer for quite a while and it was time. One of them, a gift from a Buy Nothing friend, was a bunch of green, yellow and red bell peppers, already seeded and cut in half, ready to use for pepper jelly. I had bags of mixed peppers I froze from last year's harvest, now all a mystery because I don't remember how hot they all are. Oops. I knew some were jalapeños, some pepperoncinis (thanks to the wrinkles), those red ones might be Fresnos which are hotter. Basically, a mystery grab bag.

Off to Chili Pepper Madness, where I went down a rabbit hole of various thing I could do with all those hot peppers, and a side trip to Food in Jars. Linking to all these as future inspiration:

This time around, I want hot pepper jelly, ready to put on a cracker with some Cougar Gold cheese or to zing up a sandwich. Plus, that uses up all those bell peppers just taking up freezer space.

Pepper Jelly Recipe it was.

The recipe calls for 4-5 cups of chopped peppers in whatever combo you want, a mix of sweet and hot. Frozen peppers do kind of turn into mush when you chop in the food processor, which is the fastest possible way, but that's okay. I didn't want to go over the top on hot peppers either. I sliced the tip off a few of them to check hotness (okay, that one's a Fresno!) and ended up with 2+ cups of sweet pepper, 2 cups of mild to hot pepper.

Yield: 9 half-pints, one quarter pint. Good heat with a noticeable burn but not one that punishes you for tasting. 


On to my next adventure in putting a bit of heat in a jar: Blackcurrant Jam with Chocolate and Chili from Larder Love.

A couple of tweaks:

  • Subbed in blackberries for blackcurrants. I do have a currant bush but it produces too few to turn into jam. I live in western Washington so, y'know, blackberries. Since they're super seedy, I first warmed them up a bit, then mashed part of the batch through a sieve to do a "reduced seeds" (not seedless) jam.
  • Larder Love calls for shaving an actual bar of chocolate, 70% cacao, into the jam. I'd already made Chocolate Cherry Jam, which simply used cocoa powder, and it was fantastic. I thought about saving the dark chocolate for actual eating, but decided to make the recipe as written this first time around. (Because who could resist making something like this again, right?) I saved myself the shaving step because I got dark chocolate chips.
  • She doesn't do hot-water bath canning; she's in the UK. I do and just follow standard jam timing.

I had a really big quantity of blackberries. Two evenings of picking gave me 4-3/4 yogurt cartons (my standard picking container; easy to carry a few in my bike pannier and make a stop when I spot ripe fruit). This turned out to be 1,883 grams (weighed after I had put about one-third of the berries through a sieve to mash out some of the seeds). Adjusting Larder Love's recipe quantities and doing some tasting for heat, I arrived at this recipe. You can shift quantities by maintaining ratios or go back to her recipe.

Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

  • Blackberries: 1,883 grams, or around 10 cups
  • Sugar: 1,130 grams (60% of berry weight)
  • Lemon juice: 3-3/4 T.
  • Chili flakes: 2-1/4 t. (increased from 1-3/4 t. I started with, which was the multiplier of her quantity)
  • Dark chocolate chips or grated dark chocolate bar, at least 70% cacao: 226 grams
I worked over roughly 1/3 of the blackberries to mash them through a sieve to eliminate seeds. That's a lot of work, which is why the rest of the blackberries went in whole. Fiber's good for you, after all.

Mix together the blackberries, sugar, lemon juice, and chili flakes and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring ingredients to a boil over high heat and mash them with a potato masher to break the blackberries up. Stir in the dark chocolate chips or shavings, then reduce the heat to medium-high and keep stirring until the jam shows evidence of jelling. It will turn syrupy, and a spoon held on its side will have blackberry syrup running off it in slower drops, not watery like juice. For me this took around 35-40 minutes.

Canning prep: Start this when you bring the blackberries to a boil. Put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get your canning kettle water to a boil.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight. Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water. 

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 6 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

Related Reading and Recipes

Posted
Themes: , , , No comments :

Green Tomato Caponata Recipe

I realized/rediscovered that I had around 7 pounds of frozen green tomatoes left from last year's harvest. (This is what happens when your garage holds both a full-sized freezer and the old fridge with a freezer space you don't look into very often.)

I'm still more than fully stocked up with green tomato chutney and have full confidence that I'll end up with more green tomatoes at the end of this year's gardening. Last year I experimented with a chutney sauce and (unsuccessfullly) with green tomato ketchups (never again!).

This year it's caponata. I've made this before when I ended up with eggplant from a Buy Nothing source. It's delicious on pasta, rice, or bread as a chunky dip.

Sources: Two recipes, one not designed for canning that's essentially a caponata pickle, one that calls for ripe tomatoes and is tested for canning, made with different quantities of tomatoes.

Things I did:
  • Increased the sugar the Ball recipe called for because I was using green tomatoes instead of ripe. For 7 lbs. of green tomatoes I used 3 T. brown sugar, 4 T. white sugar, basically 1 T. per pound/cup of tomatoes.
  • Working with frozen tomatoes, most of them cherry or grape size, I gave up on the idea of removing the skins. I know, I know, you're supposed to take them off. 
    • Pro tip/note to self: In future freezing frenzy at the end of a long growing season, blanch tomatoes and pull the skins off, then chop before freezing. You'll thank yourself.
  • I wanted the balsamic of the pickle recipe. I checked my (store brand) balsamic and it's 6% acidity. In the step where I sauteed onion, bell pepper, and celery, I used 1/4 c. balsamic in place of the 1/4 c. water the Ball recipe calls for. I honestly don't know if the flavor came through, given the strong flavors of all the other ingredients.
  • Added a sprinkle of red chili pepper flakes, then another one. This honestly could be oomphed more.
  • I used the green Castelvetrano olives but I don't honestly love olives even though I cook with olive oil, so I reduced the amount. You do you.
(Green) Tomato Caponata 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prep a roasting pan by spraying or brushing it lightly with oil. Prep your canning jars.
  • Green tomatoes: 7 pounds, around 7 cups after smashing in the food processor
    • Feel free to use ripe tomatoes! If you do, reduce the sugar to 2 T.
  • Eggplant: 2 small ones, about 2 lb (1 kg) total, stemmed and quartered lengthwise
  • Sweet red peppers: 2, seeded and halved, or use 3 jars of roasted red peppers
  • Onions: 2 large, diced
  • Celery: 2-3 ribs, diced
  • Garlic: 6 cloves, minced or crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
  • Water or balsamic vinegar: 1/4 cup for sauteeing step
  • Olives: Castelvetrano green olives or kalamata black olives, pitted and chopped, 1/2 cup up to 1-1/2 cups
  • Capers: 1/2 cup, drained
  • Salt: 1-1/2 T.
  • Black pepper: 1 T.
  • Red pepper flakes: 1/4 t., or more to taste
  • Red wine vinegar, or another vinegar 5% acidity or greater: 1 cup
  • Brown sugar: 3 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes; feel free to start with less sugar of either variety and adjust to your taste)
  • White sugar:  4 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes)
Oven roasting

Roast tomatoes, eggplants, and red peppers skin side up for 25-30 minutes, until skins begin to char. Remove and let cool until you can handle them without burning yourself. Remove skins. Chop tomatoes and set aside in one bowl. Chop peppers and scoop eggplants from skin (or peel skin from eggplant, whichever way you do it) and set those aside in another bowl.

Get the canning water heating and prep your jars: Depending on the size of your canning pot you may want to start it warming while the veggies are roasting. 

Once the vegetables are out of the oven, reduce heat to 200 degrees and put your jars in there on a roasting pan or cookie sheet to sterilize them.

Sauteeing

In a nonreactive pan or Dutch oven big enough to hold all the ingredients, saute the diced onions and garlic in 1/4 cup water or balsamic vinegar until onions are translucent, about 10 minutes. At about 8 minutes in, add the garlic (which can burn if you put it in too early).

Combining and cooking

Add the tomatoes and all remaining ingredients, except eggplant and peppers. Simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently (tomato can burn quickly), until slightly thickened, about 20 minutes. 

Taste and adjust seasonings; maybe you want a bit more salt or more red chili flakes. 

Stir in eggplant and peppers and cook an additional 5 minutes.

Canning

By now your big kettle of water is boiling and your jars are sterilized. Fill jars, leaving a 1/4 inch air space. Wipe rims with a damp paper towel. Dip lids in the boiling water and put them on the jars, adjusting to fingertip tight. 

Process for 35 minutes. When you take them out, set them on a towel on top of a cookie rack and wait for that satisfying ping/pop.

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 5 pints, 7 half-pints

Related reading and recipes


Posted
Themes: , , No comments :

Living, Every Day

"What are the things you do to make everyday life enjoyable?"

This question in the weekend thread on Ask A Manager, where we can talk about anything but work, sparked a reflection on the many ways I'm able to do just that. 

I have a morning routine that gives me a peaceful start to the day. I write in my journal, read some poetry, and if my schedule allows I do a short yoga practice and/or meditate. But first, I sit on my sofa with my cat on my lap, drink good French Press coffee my sweetheart makes for me, let my brain wake up. I read poetry because it won't ensnare me the way fiction will, and nonfiction so often feels like work or homework. Both of my daughters live far away and I often record a poem for them and send the link if it's online, or a picture of the page in the book I'm reading. If I go too long without doing that I get a "where's the poetry, Mom?" message.

As part of my morning routine I visit grateful.org and respond to the question of the day. The community there is warm and welcoming, and the question always reminds me of my generally great good fortune. I read responses from people who haven't been as fortunate and it's clearly helping them too, as we pause to pay attention the way I'm doing with this question.

An element of the journal—and if you stop reading after this paragraph you've gotten the most important thing I do: As I start each day's pages I set one part of a page apart and head it "Today's delights—" thanks to reading Ross Gay's The Book of Delights*. I enjoy doing some decoration of the spot and use a different color of ink so it stands out. And then I pay attention! Over the course of the day I find what I'm looking for, which is the small delights each day holds. It might be that first cup of fresh, hot coffee; the cat's warmth on my lap and the way he leans into my hand to have his chin skritched; putting together an outfit I really love for the color combination; seeing a deer on the sidewalk in our neighborhood (so far I've been lucky and they haven't jumped the fence to snack on my garden); the social energy of a community event; hearing the deep tones of the windchimes outside my office window when the breeze picks up. Whatever I find delightful, which happens when I pause and pay attention to that happy little zing.

Other things:

I got a walking pad that has made a real difference in my energy level over the course of the day. When I can I also go outside for brief walks between meetings. This isn't skipping work, this is work; the brain needs unscheduled time to process and make new connections. I live in a small neighborhood with a loop street and almost no traffic, which makes it easy to do 2 or 3 loops. If I had a linear street I'd probably pick a landmark as a turnaround point. 

I turn some meetings into walking meetings, too. I live near both a small park and a big park. Walking and listening makes me a more attentive participant than if I sit at my desk with three screens in front of me and plenty of emails awaiting a reply and inviting me to tune out the meeting. I love being in a green space hearing bird calls, seeing ferns and moss, winding along the soft trails.

When I go outside or when I sit at a table I have near a window, I look at the sky. I might watch clouds moving, which I can do right now, puffy white clouds against a blue sky; appreciate the deep blue if that's what I have; decide that all my walking will be inside because it's pouring rain. Whatever it is, the sky is always there and I feel as if I've ignored it more often in the past than I paid attention to it, once I outgrew lying on the lawn and looking up to identify cloud pictures. (A very delightful thing to do that I'm coming back to)

Thanks to my sweetheart I stay stocked up on dark chocolate sea salt truffles. In the evening I eat one, maybe two, for a touch of sweetness at the end of the day.

An important piece of this: I don't tell myself I've been "good" in what I ate and therefore somehow earned the chocolate. Food is enjoyable and I let myself enjoy it without any calorie-counting or nutritional analysis. (I'm fortunate not to have any health conditions that would require me to do this.) Giving up the societally created pressure to have a body that looks a certain way has been very freeing. My body can move and laugh and hug and that's what counts.

I ride my bike or take the bus for most transportation. I chose to (and could afford to) live in a location that lets me do this. I find driving stressful, whereas when I ride my bike I feel joyful and free and arrive happy. On the bus I see the regulars, look at the houses and yards we pass, maybe listen to a podcast. Either way I don't have to worry about finding or paying for a parking spot when I arrive at my destination.

I grow a garden and preserve a lot of food through canning, freezing, and dehydrating. It's such a delight to pull a jar of jam out in midwinter, open it up and smell the raspberries I grew in the summer. I give away much of what I can and it makes me happy to share the bounty.

I love this question. What's your answer? 


*Bookshop.org affiliate link. Go to your local independent bookstore if you can, or get it from your library, but the link is here if you need it.

Posted
Themes: , No comments :
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )
UA-58053553-1