Tag: canning

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A Strawberry Fig Visit

I picked the last of the figs yesterday, half at lunchtime when I was letting the dogs out and half after getting home from a day of work and a haircut. I was determined to make strawberry figs just like my mother always made at the end of each summer, when we’d put on aprons and each take a job of washing, chopping, and stirring in her kitchen.

Temperatures are finally out of the 90s, and the mornings are beginning their wee hour thermostat adjustment one little tap a week, it seems. When that happens, the figs that aren’t finished off by birds, butterflies, and squirrels – or picked before anything else gets them first – dry up like upside-down miniature deflated balloons hanging on the stems. I was able to reach enough remaining good figs for one last wave of canning for this season.

I found strawberries price-slashed on the clearance cart in our local grocery store and added a couple of two-pound boxes of cane sugar to my buggy.

My husband was off at a meeting, so it was only me and the strong presence of my mother in the kitchen washing, chopping, and stirring up strawberry fig memories together, steam rising and aromas swelling. And tears welling, as I think of all the things since December 29, 2015 that I want to tell her.

You have six great grandchildren now, Mom. Four boys and two girls. Aidan is an avid reader just like you, Sawyer loves science and nature, Saylor has ultra sass and is tougher than any of the boys, River loves to be barefooted in his backyard kayaking through the marsh and running with his three dogs, Beckham never likes wearing any clothes, and Magnolia Mae is only a month old and already a sweet little blossom rooted deep in southern culture, on her way to becoming another strong woman on your branch of the tree. Your three grandchildren are all on their feet, moving onward!

And my brother Ken is in love with his soul mate and she’s good for him, Dad needs you to tell him the answers (and how to let things go), and so do the rest of us. You’d love all three of our dogs that you never met. Your last words to dad – “You take care of these dogs” – assure me that you’d be proud to know that our Boo Radley, Fitz (short for F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Ollie (named for Mary Oliver) basically run the house so much that we call them our four-legged sons.

Thank you for teaching me the ways of your kitchen and giving me a love of strawberry figs that not everyone knows how to appreciate. As the autumn nears and passes and winter arrives, the warmth of toast laden with butter and slathered with strawberry figs will keep you here with me.

And I still need you, Mom.

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A Day of Canning

My sister-in-law canning blueberries in a water bath

Sunday morning began early. Like 5 a.m. early.

Two kitchens on the Johnson Funny Farm were tackling a mission to prepare two foods each and swap some goods, like an old-fashioned cookie swap – – only different. We started with fruits ~ vegetables will come later.

Bethany’s blueberries

My sister-in-law and I both canned cinnamon spiced apples and she canned apple butter using apples we’d purchased at Jaemor Farms in Alto, Georgia on her birthday outing on Saturday after our stroll through Gibbs Gardens. She also canned blueberries. I canned peach marmalade using peaches also purchased at Jaemor Farms and also canned fig marmalade. I would have ordinarily used peaches from Gregg Farms, our local orchard two miles from our home, but over 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop was lost this year due to weather, and Gregg’s lost every one of their peaches.

The figs, though, were grown forty feet from our house on a tree I planted in 2009, purchased for $3.00 on a clearance rack at Home Depot. We have loved on this tree for a decade and a half. Some years we’ve made fig preserves, but other years we’ve let the black swallowtails and monarchs feast on the fermenting figs without the threat of our picking. One year, a good friend came to pick some for a prized fig cake she was baking from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and she brought us one of her cakes as well. The memories of figs are alive and well from this tree and from the trees of my mother and grandmothers as we made strawberry figs together with my children for so many years.

And Jesus himself liked figs. (21st Chapter of Matthew)

Citrus puree for preservation of marmalade

So our day of canning started with peeling, slicing, chopping, blending, and dicing that led to boiling, stirring, simmering, scooping, sealing, cooling, and labeling.

We made a jar run to purchase some jars with sealing lids and rings, pectin, and other ingredients.
My sister-in-law Bethany’s apple butter

My peach marmalade
Fig marmalade


Canning was a great way to relax and fill our homes with the aromas of the love language of cooking, but I’m still trying my best to make the math work. I remained in the black on the figs I grew if I didn’t factor in the cost of the jars and lids (repeated jar uses would lessen that cost each time). With the cost of the peaches, I went into the red compared to what was on the shelf at Jaemor, already canned. Ounce for ounce, I paid more to do the canning – and I didn’t count the time or the electricity, or the extra air conditioning in the already hot kitchen. I would need to grow my own peaches or buy the bruised or overripe fruits and can them that day to make the cost analysis work compared to what I could buy already in jars canned by a professional who is far more skilled than I am. But I realize it is all about the fun and the preservation of foods for those winter storms when we need to hunker down and stay home by the fire and recall the warmth of summer fruits and memories in the kitchen to soothe our souls.

(I still think free-range chickens are the best investment for self-sustaining farm, if we could keep the hawks away).

If you have an amazing recipe for canning – or tips to keep it more affordable – please share in the comments below. I’d love some great instant pot and crock pot canning recipes. I don’t think I’m a good candidate for a pressure cooker. I might really do some damage with that.

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Making Fig Marmalade

I recently asked Dad to text me some of the recipes for foods I remember making with my mother when I was younger. He sent me several snapshots of recipes, and even a photo of a lock of my childhood hair that my mother had tucked away in the recipe box in a blue envelope.

After work on Thursday, I swung by our local grocery store on the way home from work to pick up some jars for canning. I’ve been meaning to make some fig preserves before the figs are all dried up. Right now, the blue swallowtails are feasting on the fermented figs like it’s some kind of heavenly all-you-can-eat buffet, and I needed to pick the last of the fig harvest for this year for some recipes. I settled on Fig Marmalade.

I picked the figs from my towering fig tree that I purchased for $3.00 from a scratch-and-dent clearance cart on the side of the plant section in Home Depot over a decade ago.

I sterilized some jelly jars and lids by boiling them while I chopped the figs, simmered the lemons, grated the orange rind, and squeezed the juice.

For this recipe, I used pure cane sugar instead of regular granulated sugar. I boiled it, then simmered on low for about an hour and a half until it got thick (the recipe says 30 minutes, but I wanted mine thicker). Then, I scooped it into canning jars with seals on the lids and labeled the tops.

Since we usually have breakfast for supper a couple of times a week, we consume a lot of jelly with our toast. I’ve also used it to put on brie with crackers. I used one of my mother’s old measuring cups that we’d used together as I made the marmalade (it has a chip in one place that feels a lot like an age wrinkle), so it has her hand in it, too. This will surely bring back all the memories and feels of my childhood fig marmalade.

Toast, anyone?

Jars of fig marmalade – September 2023
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Strawberry Pigs

Lately I’ve been grounding myself in my rural Georgia blessings by rereading Gladys Taber‘s books about her life on her farm, Stillmeadow, in the hills of Connecticut. Every sentence she writes, it seems, takes me to comforting places that fill me with the joy of memories and the inspiration to carry on the traditions and legacy that my mother left.

In the August chapter of Stillmeadow Calendar A Countrywoman’s Journal, Gladys shares, “Corn stands silken in the field, chicory stars the roadside, and goldenrod mints her coin. The kitchen smells of spices and syrups, ming and sweet pepper. It is the time of “putting up,” a rewarding time for country-folk. I believe it is an instinct in man to store things against the winter, even when there is a supermarket a few blocks or miles away. It is part of the rhythm of life.”

When my children were young, I’d meet my mother at the halfway point so that the kids could visit a week every summer with their grandparents. Just a few weeks ago, as I was visiting one of my girls, we passed a Dairy Queen.

“That makes me think of all those times Mimi would take us to get a Cotton Candy Blizzard,” she shared. “Those were the best days of my life. I loved making strawberry pigs with Mimi.”

My mother had a fig tree, and they’d all go out and pick figs in the back yard and strawberries from a neighbor’s patch. Mom would get out the pressure cooker and a box of clean Mason jars and lids. Everyone had a job to do well beyond the picking – – washing figs, hulling strawberries, slicing fruits, measuring sugar, stirring. It was a day-long event with everyone fully-aproned, and they stocked our pantry and theirs with all the toast topping they needed for the coming winter months.

My grown children still call strawberry figs “strawberry pigs,” from their days of childhood mispronunciations.

When we moved onto the Johnson Funny Farm in 2008, I found a little twig of a scratch-and-dent turkey fig on the clearance rack at Home Depot and bought it for $3.00. My husband put up the orange plastic netting around it to keep from running the tractor over it, and today it stands taller than a clown on stilts and is more solid than any prize bull.

My scratch-and-dent clearance fig

I walk out to the fig tree this morning, inspecting the forthcoming fruits, anticipating their ripening. A fig harvest heralds the end of summer and beginning of fall – my favorite time of year! And I feel my mother’s arm around my shoulders, erasing all distance between heaven and earth, assuring me that the time spent doing simple things with those we love is the best gift of all. The simple act of making memories transcends years, space, and distance and preserves the togetherness and belonging – – the “putting up” of love scooped and slathered freely like a medicinal balm at the twist of a jar lid when it’s needed in the winters of our lives.