Rachael

Oh, my god, I made lemon marmalade! And it came out SO WELL. And it was SO EASY. I am MARM-ELATED. 

And I have spent almost eight years in this house with a marmalade lemon tree that never stops producing, and the fruit just falls to the ground. We use a lot for cooking and every once in a while we make lemonade, but up till now that was all we did. 

Those days are over, my friends. 

Avoid the strange looking ones. 

I thought I’d give you a simple breakdown of what I did for two reasons: 1) so I can find it later and 2) because I read about four million recipes out there and they were all soooo different and all of them were missing crucial elements necessary for the newbie (and nervous) first-time canner. I’d never sealed jars before. Now I have and it’s not hard. It’s a bit scary at first, but it’s also fun and overall, easy.

Things you’ll need to buy for canning if you ain't got 'em already: 

Nonreactive pot to make the marmalade in (it should hold twice as much jam as you want to make) (I bet you have one. Your soup pot will work, probably). 

Pot for boiling the jars – I got this el cheapo one with a jar rack at my Ace Hardware which had EVERYTHING I needed for canning. Like, you could go to your Ace right now and get this stuff. Right NOW.* 

Canning tongs and funnel – get these. You will regret not getting these. 

Piece of cheesecloth or piece of old, clean T-shirt, piece of string

Jars! Use the half pint size! A whole pint is nutty! Get a box of 12 (comes with jars, lids, and bands)

 

Ingredients  in a 1:1:1 ratio: 

Lemons – get some, any kind.  
Sugar – have some 
Water – you’re good

THAT’S IT.

Who knew? You don't even need pectin, because lemons have enough of their own! (You knew this? Okay. Your recipe is probably better, too. But mine is EASY.) 

For my marmalade, I used about ten lemons from the tree in the backyard. This made a lot, about 12 half pints. Use two lemons for practice! Make a lil bit just for fun! 

I spent a long time researching how to pith, deseed, dress, slice, whap, and dice those babies. I did it carefully and beautifully for ONE lemon and then my hands notified me that I had four cuts, a burn, and two hangnails I hadn’t noticed. Lemon juice is painful. Screw that (unless you don’t have a food processor or Vitamix, in which case, I’m sorry, and wear gloves).

Prep:

Put on some good tunes or a podcast you’ve been dying to listen to. Wear your cutest apron (I’m reminding you, because you always forget to wear it, I know you do). 

Put some small plates in the freezer. You’ll need those later to test doneness. 

Sterilization:

Wash and dry your jars, lids, and bands with warm soapy water. Put them on a cookie sheet or two in the oven at 225F for 10 minutes. When they’re cooked just let ‘em sit in the stove till you’re ready to fill them. It’s okay if they go cold again. 

Fill that big old pot up with water and set it to boiling. It will take forever, so start now. When it hits a boil, you can turn it off until you need to use it. 

Lemon prep:

Wash the lemons. This is nice to do for everyone, including the lemon.

Slice off the ends. Then cut the lemons in half. Try your best to wrangle out that white pith that runs up and down the middle of the lemon — use your hands, feel free to mash it around. Try to get the seeds out. Mine didn’t have many. Put the lemon halves into your food processor or Vitamix or whatnot. Put the piths and seeds into that little bit of cheesecloth and tie it up (this gives it more natural pectin). 

I used my Vitamix, filled it with lemon halves, and then covered the lemons with water. Then I chopped ‘em up. You want them in small pieces, big enough to suit your bite need in your marmalade. Don’t puree them. Dump this into a colander. Then, when drained, dump into your nonreactive pot using a measuring cup. NOTE HOW MANY CUPS OF LEMON YOU HAVE. Add the bag of pith/seeds and exactly the same number cups of water (see how you could make a lot or a little and not worry about amounts?). 

Bring to boil then keep at high simmer for 2ish hours until peels are soft. Water will boil away, maybe half of it? That’s okay. Add the same number of cups sugar, bring to a boil and stir occasionally, boil for 10-20 minutes, checking setting point. 

Setting point:

Get out a cold plate from the freezer, drizzle some marmalade on it. Give it a minute or two to set. Run your finger through it. If it wrinkles, you’re done. If it’s still runny, boil some more. 

NOTE: This is where I panicked. Mine never set right. I boiled for almost an hour, and that stuff stayed runny (I think I hadn’t boiled it long enough in the first cooking without sugar). I read enough on the internet to panic, learning that I could over-boil it and then when it cooled it would turn to rock, so I put it in jars, hoping for the best and expecting the worst, but the next morning, IT WAS MARMALADE! It had marmelled! It was marmellous! So I’m saying to trust your gut here. 

Turn the burner on under the big pot of water again. You’ll need it boiling soon. 

Putting it in jars! The fun part!

Using your favorite soup ladle and the canning funnel, ladle into the jars, leaving 1/2 inch of room at the top. Put on a lid and secure the lid with a band (the outer ringy thingy). Only tighten until you feel resistance, do NOT torque the band on tight. Just lightly, till it stops twisting. Then using your tongs, which you were clever enough to buy, lower the jars into the pot of hot water and onto the jar rack. Once all the jars are in the water and the water has hit a boil, boil for another 10-15 minutes. Turn off the gas or move the pot carefully off the hot part of the stove. Using tongs, remove jars to cool, placing them on a cloth (important because the cold counter touching the glass jars can cause breakage).

You’ll hear pings and pops, and that’s good and magical, because they’re SEALING. You’re totally DOING THIS. 

Leave ‘em there.

Take pictures. Instagram them. You totally should. They’re so PRETTY. In the morning, remove the bands, test them for seal by lifting them an inch or two (briefly!) by the lids. They should stick together. If one hasn't sealed right, put that one in the fridge and eat it first! Decorate! Give away! Or keep them all for yourself. But you won’t be able to. I’d gave my first away while it was still warm to these pretty ladies who stopped by and got covered with every animal we own:

*affiliate links

** the links are affiliates, not the women.  KiraK and RachelD are just awesome. My extra sisters. 

My friend Duff wrote herself in three songs, based on this post, and I love the idea of this challenge. 

Apparently I'm in the mood for culling down to the essential today. I've pared my closet to 33 items (not including handknits — I TRIED! I really did. But I couldn't do it) and now I'm paring down to three songs. 

I've realized lately that both my jobs are completely language focussed. The writing job is obviously so, but so is the dispatch job — at 911 you can't miss a single word of an address or a symptom or what the captain says on the radio or the word knife. But when it comes to music, I'm kind of wordless. I can listen to songs for decades and be able to sing along phonetically (and even tell you the words that way, if you ask me) but I'll have no idea what the song literally means. 

It's about the feeling. It's about what the sound makes rise in me like sap. (Like sappy sap, mostly.) 

 

Murder in the City – Avett Brothers. Oh, Avetts, you tools. I do wish you weren't such tools. But I still love your music. And I take it back about the words and not listening to them, for this song. These words mean something. They mean a lot to me. Oh, my god, just listening to this again broke me down to tears. Love. Family. Friends. Gah. 

 

Stella Maris –  Moby. This song to me, is every feeling of grief and longing there ever was. This is what I put on repeat when Robin died in Pack Up the Moon (not a spoiler, his death happens before the book opens). This is what I listen to when I want to cry. Or when I want to need. 

Give it Up – Marvin Gaye. Now stop those tears, my friend, and dance. This is my theme song. If this comes on while I'm in the middle of the frozen food section of the grocery store, I will grab the stock boy and spin him around a few times. If this comes on in the DMV (oh, that it would), I will lead those waiting in a feel-good dance party. I can even karaoke it. No lie.

 

How about you? How do you describe yourself in three songs? 

Warning: I hate the phrase “trigger warning” but this is one. This post deals with violence and rape and fighting. And me, kicking ASS. 

So, I want to tell you this. I’m a badass.

Once, many years ago, I attended an Impact self-defense graduation ceremony (back then it went by the strange name of Model Mugging). I was young (in my early twenties) and I was terrified of everything. I was scared to talk to people, scared to walk down the street, scared to go to sleep at night. The reason for this was multi-layered and I don’t feel like getting into exactly how my young psyche had been damaged, but one of the reasons I was scared was that I’d been raped. It was date rape (and oh, how I hate how that phrase can take the barb out of the word RAPE. Date rape, to me and many others, implied for many years that it was my fault. That it was a minor deal. It was neither).

To be honest, I didn’t even know I was going to write this part of this post until I started typing. I’ve told very few people this over the years. My mother knew. A few friends.

Until the Jian Ghomeshi shitstorm, I’d never admitted this online or in print, anywhere. The shame that’s internalized around rape is astonishing. You know me and admitting things. I LOVE to admit my deepest, darkest secrets and bring them into the light, but I’ve never admitted this. My stomach is in knots and I’m scared right now as I peck at the keys. I twittered a very little bit about my experience a few weeks ago while people were talking about Ghomeshi, and then I threw up and shook for the rest of the morning. But you know what? We have to talk about this. Among my women friends, more of them have been sexually assaulted than haven’t. This is true.

And this is so fucked up.

(No, before you ask (not like YOU would, YOU know better), this is not why I’m gay-married. I’m bisexual. I love (good) men, and I love (good) women. I just happen to be in love with my wife.)

So years and years ago, I went to that Impact graduation. I watched women fight their way away from men who were literally holding them down, picking them up, throwing them around. I wasn’t alone in crying my way through the graduation, and I vowed I would take the class someday. I vowed I would learn to be as strong as they were.

The problem was that the class wasn’t cheap. I was a broke college student for a long time, and then I was just a broke, indebted American for a long time.

Then I could afford it.

I signed up for the Basics course earlier this year, and I swear to you, I’ve never been more terrified to do something in my whole life. It’s a four day course, and by the time we were ten minutes into the class, I wanted to run. I fantasized about doing it so clearly I was surprised to find myself still standing in place.

I stayed.

First, with the help of our inspiring whistle instructor (the female teacher who’s literally right next to you during every fight, coaching you, blowing the whistle when you’ve won), we learned how to say No.

See, as women, we often don’t know how to say this effectively. And we certainly don’t know how to yell it. Our first group “No” was timid. Almost polite. A questioning, “No?” Am I doing this right? 

Then, with the help of the amazing suited instructors (the men who wear the full-body suits which allow them to absorb our punches and kicks), we learned how to fight. I have to admit, I had some doubt about the men. What kind of guy would sign up to come at women menacingly? Now I know. The best kind of men. The men who want women to be safe in this world. They’re kind and generous and—honestly—pretty awe inspiring in their dedication to the cause of halting violence against women. I can’t say enough about them.

Now, in my whole life I had never hit a person who wasn’t a sister (and even when I was a kid, I was always better with words than fists). The first twenty or so times I hit a suited instructor, I apologized. I APOLOGIZED. We all did.

You know what? By the end of the class, I could take a man out. In order to graduate, we had to land several knock-out blows. Guess who managed to do this? Everyone in the class, including the ones who were much skinnier or much heavier than I was, including the ones who were twenty years younger or older than I am.

After that class, I was so much less scared. I didn’t know how much fear I carried walking in the BART parking lot at night, going out our front door in the dark, walking through the city, until that fear was lifted off. Not coincidentally, the next week, I got a bike. I wasn’t scared anymore to be knocked off it. No, I sure as heck don’t want to be knocked off my bike. I don’t want to be robbed. But now I know how to take care of myself, of my body, and I wasn’t scared for the first time in my life.

I loved Basics so much I signed up for Multiple Assailants, which I took last weekend. In this class, you’re not going so much for the knock-out blows (but those are nice to land, sure). Instead, you’re trying to land incapacitating blows, one after another; you line them up, and knock them down so you can get away and call help.

And I have to tell you, this class was even more terrifying to me than the Basics had been (with as much as I’d loved Basics, I didn’t expect this). A two-day class, I didn’t want to go either day. I literally prayed for a migraine. The first time three guys came at me, I almost lost control of my bladder.

Then, because I knew how, I fought.

I’m posting a video here of one of my fights in class.

It’s scary. If you’re tense right now, if you feel like crying while reading this, please don’t watch. Or at least don’t want alone. Watch with someone who can talk to you afterward, who can give you a hug if you need it. (This is me hugging you.) The instructors use language that’s street-real. You can tell I’m scared in this video.

But I’m also exhilarated. Those punches and kicks I’m landing might look like much, but they’re using all my strength, all my muscle, and I’m a strong woman. A normal guy who wasn’t wearing that suit would not get back up. Period. They would either be unconscious or vomiting from pain.

If you want to donate directly to Impact, go here. They always, always need the money.  If you want to see if they’re in your area, click here.

Conclusion:

I don’t expect to ever have to use these skills. If mugged, I’ll give up my backpack. You can have my bike. But try to touch me? I’ll lay you OUT, motherfucker.

And that makes me feel like I can fly.

 

 

Once I was at a HarperCollins party at the Central Park Boathouse in New York. I felt like a naive, squawking goose because I was surrounded by successful authors who didn't seem to think this was a big deal. 

To me it was a VERY big deal. I told one of the editors that–that I couldn't believe where I was–and she was glad to hear it. She didn't think my funny overeager faces were silly. She got excited, too, when I told her how I felt. 

I think it's important to remember these kinds of things. In anything, when you achieve a goal, let yourself bask. Bask in the glow of pride and the knowledge that you freaking DID it. Remember when your mom would point out something that you just did that was pretty cool, and she'd say, "Aren't you proud of yourself?" (I hope your mother did that. If not, I'll say it to you. You should be so proud of yourself, friend, for doing that awesome thing, even if was just a small step. Good on you.) 

Yesterday I had one of those days. I worked a 72 hour shift (that wasn't part of it though it wasn't bad), got home and napped till 1pm (that was part of it. Nothing like sleeping till 1pm, even if you didn't go to bed till 9am. It always feels decadent). Then I got up and went to Mills and wrote a couple of thousand words for NaNoWriMo (I'm still ahead! Loving that!). 

Then, get this: I spoke to a writing class at Mills on being a working writer. 

That has been a dream of mine. That's been a dream for a long, long time. I've taught a lot of places, literally all over the country, and most recently, down under. But when I was at Mills as a grad student, years and years ago, I would walk across the quad, lost in imagining myself in the future, wearing stylish boots, my published books in one hand, a coffee in another, going to talk to students about writing. 

Yesterday afternoon my boots were Dansko and not that stylish, but I was wearing a sweater I'd bound off that very morning, the books in my bag were mine, and I was clutching that coffee like it was the only way I'd keep breathing. 

The students were amazing, and asked awesome questions. They want to be writers like I used to want to be (and now am! Pinch me again!). I want each and every one of them to end up playing the starring role in their own dream. I want that for YOU, too. Keep taking those steps, okay? Those little actions, that tiny risk you take today gets you that much closer. 

Me, after class, a little verklempt. 

Afterward, as night fell, I put the top down on the bridge on the drive to San Francisco and tried to soak up and enjoy every minute of it. The air smelled of the rain that had fallen earlier that day, and I realized that both of the towns I love best (Oakland and Venice) smell best when cool and damp. The smell of dirt and diesel and salt water. Magic of the very best kind. 

I love the new Bay Bridge.

Then Lala and I had date night. We had dinner on the sidewalk at the Grove, and then went to see Jill Lepore talk about her Wonder Woman book. It was a freaking perfect day. 

And it didn't hurt that for all that I was wearing a new sweater. This sweater was supposed to have sleeves, yes, but as I was knitting it, I realized how thick it was. I would for sure never wear it, EVER. I wondered how it would look as a vest. 

 Pattern: DROPS Chocolate Passion, in Quince and Co Osprey. Ravelry details here. 

It's an interesting construction, and will look/fit better after a bit of a block, but you know me. I'm impatient. 

And I just realized this: Finishing this means I can start a new sweater with the handspun I've been spinning from the New Zealand wool! Eeep! Today, my reward for doing my NaNoWriMo words will be picking a pattern and swatching. 

I feel so deeply happy and grateful to be exactly where I am. Right now. I wish for you the same. 

* I keep forgetting to draw winners! The winner of Chris Baty's book is Jeanne B. and the winner of Larissa Brown's Shieldmaiden Knits is Linda McD — you've both been emailed.