Inside My Mid-life Crisis

In yet another exploration into foodie creativity I decided to make jam. And might as well make some butter while we are at it!

This was actually pretty easy. The hardest part is getting all the equipment together. I happened to have my mom's canning jars and canning pot "in storage" so I had pretty much everything. The other important item is a non-reactive pan--I used my big stainless steel All-Clad.

When we were visting the Finger Lakes NY wine country a few years ago, we were served a couple jams based with wine at the B&B we stayed at..I choose a Rhubarb-Chardonnay jam recipe to try from the Ball (jar) website:
4 C sugar
5 T Ball Real Fruit Instant Pectin
4 C chopped fresh rhubarb
1 750ml bottle of chardonnay
5 Plastic Freezer jars
**NOTE--when instructed to follow directions EXACTLY when canning; uh you better do that as you will see later!
I follow the directions and prep the sugar, pectin, chop the rhubarb and get to cooking it. My jars are heating up in the canner and I decide that I want my jam shelf stable and plan to hot water process after filling the jars. Now jars are hot, lids and rings are heated...time to blend up the fruit a bit more so out comes my boat-motor mixer to finish this task handily...
I cook a bit more until the desired consistency is achieved based on the spoon test--jam coats the back of a spoon. I take my jars out of the water and begin to fill them, wipe the rims and place the seals on the jars, add the rings finger tight and place back in the water bath. Jar one, jar two, jar 3 CRACK.
So maybe we will go ahead and stick to freezer jam. Having already lost an entire jar (a big one of course) I pull them all out of the water and finish filling. I wound up with 2 large and 2 small jars. I allow them to cool on the towel overnight and refrigerate one and freeze the others.
This is AWESOME jam, its still a little tart (even with all that sugar!!) and you can taste just a hint of the chardonnay. LOVE IT!
I plan to make another batch but I will follow the instructions EXACTLY next time :)

Now, what good is home-made jam without home-made butter? I grabbed a pint of heavy cream and a fresh baguette and away we go! The cream is from a dairy in Mt. Vernon, they don't "highly" pasteurize their milk so it actually tastes like something (even the skim tastes better, this is also the dairy I use when I made cheese but we will do that again another day).

Put the cream in your mixer. A stand mixer is better as it does take 15 or so minutes to whip completely then you don't have to babysit it.

After a few minutes on speed 7 it looks like whipped cream (duh) but then the solids begin to separate from the liquid. It gets grainy and there is liquid in the bottom of the bowl...
Once it was all separated I removed the solid butter  from the buttermilk straining through a bit of cheesecloth and then squeezed my butter into a ball.
One pint of cream made a one cup ball of butter and one cup of fresh buttermilk--incidentally, naturally low fat as you have separated all the butter fat OUT to create your butter ball.
The butter is creamy and smooth and tasty..I choose not to salt mine but you certainly can salt to taste during the last minute or 2 of whipping. Worth the effort for the wonderful taste and freshness and you know exactly what went into it.