On Monday morning the weather was beautiful, so I planned out an awesome Homestead day. I was only lacking one person and one tool (a post-pounder, an auger, or a sharp-shooter) for finally replacing my rustic-unchic front fence. I wanted to put in a farm fence, minus the barbed wire. Instead, I’ve got a roll of welded wire, which should look something like this when done. I’ve got nice round cedar fence posts from the country, not square city fence posts.

Being one person too short (yes, I am one person and, at 5’4″, too short, but here I mean too few), I mucked about with what remained of putting the garden to bed for winter, and covered the rose bushes. (Yes, I have rose bushes. I barely deserve them. So rarely does one have what one deserves!)

In so doing, I got stung by a wasp on the fleshy part of my left hand. That put a stop to further garden work. It also put a stop to chopping, so I didn’t tackle the red pepper jelly until today.

These beautiful red “piments rouges” peppers — not pimentos, which are stumpier — came courtesy of the grocery store, which is so kind as to give me, the bunny lady, any produce destined for la poubelle. I gave a few peppers to the rabbits (they were not so spicy as to be a problem) before I thought to make jelly out of them. 

Red pepper jelly, in case you didn’t know, is a great addition to any cheese or cold cut sandwich.

Thoughts on recipes

I found the recipe easily enough in my collection of cookbooks from yesteryear, which are, bar none, the best cookbooks if you’re into the idea of local food. When I cannot find a pickle or preserve suggestion in my mother’s old stash, I go straight to Jehane Benoit’s Encyclopedie de la cuisine canadienne. Between this book and Mrs. Appleyard’s Family Kitchen, I have the historical stories and recipes of my entire region’s local food

– before the globalization glut that landed cantaloupe on every restaurant breakfast plate in the month of March, and the concomitant assumption that the food supply chain takes care of everything so that all we have to do is choose. Hobby horse ends here for now.

The recipes are diverse and simple. On this page, you can see quince (coings), mint (menthe fraîche), parsley (persil), lemon verbena (vervaine), and sage (sauge) jelly. Most, if not all, of these will be eaten with cheese or meats, so it’s no surprise that they’re on the same page as red pepper jelly.

However, it also has a recipe for (swoon!) currant and elderflower jelly (groseilles aux fleurs du sureau). I’m half-Danish, and when I first had elderflower juice in Copenhagen (København) it struck me that I knew this and I’d had it before, though I could not say how or where.

As Swedish venture would have it, one can now get it at IKEA. You can also get elderflower or elderberry tea at the Polish bakery.

So I’m making the jelly today. The peppers are drying out, on the old side, so they were fabulously easy to de-string and seed, though more difficult to chop. The wasp-stung hand had some work to do. Presently I’m waiting for the four hours to elapse for the peppers to sit in salt.

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Intermission on salt

Did you know that Windsor is next to Detroit, where they have a huge salt mine? It’s worth seeing the Time photo essay. Yet despite the Windsor mine being in Windsor, Windsor Salt‘s headquarters are near me, in Pointe Claire, QC. Sadly – and preventably! – their building kills birds. I’ll still buy their salt but I want them to fix their windows and landscaping.

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Now that the jelly’s done, here’s a belle photo: a Bernardin jar with pretty red contents, but which one belongs in a magazine?

Et voilà!