Pickled peaches

I pickled peaches yesterday using the easy recipe from American Cooking: Southern Style. Criticism right off the bat: the recipe doesn't tell you to process and seal the jars, so you can't store them and give them as holiday gifts and that's a shame because THEY ARE SO GORGEOUS. They practically glow. They have to sit for a few days before we eat them and are meant to be served with Virginia ham and now I'm thinking about mail ordering a Virginia ham. I will tell you how they taste and post the recipe if they are great. If they are less than great I am going to try this recipe next.

By the way, I'm truly sorry I insulted a reader with my tirade about the canning jar tattoo last week. It was a very ugly tattoo that set me off, but I shouldn't have generalized about all canning jar tattoos. I think a tattoo of a jar of pickled peaches, to name just one possibility, would be beautiful.

Last night Mark and I went to a party and one of the appetizers was roquefort grapes. I've seen that recipe so many times and thought, yuck, no thanks, but I'd never tasted a roquefort grape. Last night I tasted one. Then I tasted another. Today I bought roquefort and grapes. I'm hosting our weekly extended family dinner  and am trying to produce an eclectic, eccentric meal like my friend Mary served us in Maine of which roquefort grapes will be a piece. We'll see if I can resist making a boring salad at the last minute.

Almost as pretty as Smitten Kitchen

I saw a recipe for rhubarb-rose preserves in Linda Ziedrich's Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves and since I have both rhubarb and roses just outside my door, decided to make it.

You simmer fruit, flowers, and sugar and watch as the mixture moves rapidly from beautiful this:
to less beautiful but still beautiful this:And then you put it in jars. Here's what Ziedrich says: "A few minutes before writing these words, I opened a six-year-old jar of rhubarb-rose preserves, and for a moment I thought that the roses were blooming in the garden. These preserves can raise you out of midwinter blues into happy plans for spring."

Hope so!

Our garden is basically a catastrophe this year -- it was an unhappy spring -- but the six rhubarb seeds I planted in the happy spring of 2009 have grown to a lush, waist-high forest. Some people say you should wait until year three to harvest rhubarb, but the stalks are so abundant and thick that I pulled a few anyway. This is the leaf from a single stalk, with a big, fat hardcover book for scale:
Bloggers are always coming up with contests. What contest should I set up so I can send the winner a jar of this jam?