Recently I recommended Ball freezer jars. Since then I’ve been using them for all sorts of things: salad dressing, Iris’s lunch, plutonium. And now, actual jam.

Neil wrote:

> By the way, freezer jam totally kicks regular jam’s ass. My Mom made a LOT of jam back in the day (we never bought the stuff) and when she switched to the new-fangled freezer recipe there was no going back. Regular jam to me tastes overly “cooked,” bland and too sweet. By comparison, freezer jam tastes like fresh fruit in jam form. Much easier and faster to make, too.

On Sunday, Laurie came back from the farmers market with four pints of strawberries and turned half of this bounty into jam. Iris attacked the strawberries with a potato masher. The carnage was total. Then Laurie stirred in pectin and sugar. Too much sugar, as it turned out, since the strawberries were already very sweet. Even so, this is the best strawberry jam I’ve ever had.

It’s great on an Eggo with whipped cream, Greek yogurt, or mascarpone. For snack this afternoon I had it on a wheat berry english muffin. “I think I got a wheat berry!” said Iris, all excited.

Pok Pok, my favorite restaurant in Portland, is the Oregonian’s restaurant of the year.

> Why is Pok Pok our Restaurant of the Year? Because Ricker, 43, has smashed the mold with cooking rarely encountered outside its home turf. You’d have to look hard in this country, let alone Portland, to find a similar collection of dishes so deep and rigorous and able to change our preconceptions of what this food can be. These aren’t simple formulas readily found in cookbooks — they rely on one man’s determination to wander, discover, deconstruct, hunt down ingredients and test, test, test to hit as close to perfection as possible.

Congratulations, Andy.

Matters of personal finance are better left personal or discussed by articulate experts like [Stacy Cowley](http://www.birdsandbills.com/), but I can’t introduce this topic without explaining that Laurie and I have developed an arcane system for taking one monthly paycheck and randomly occurring freelance writing checks and turning it into a steady income stream without running out of money at the end of the month. One clever module of this exquisitely fine-tuned system tends to make us run out of money during the third week of the month.

So we look into the pantry.

I’d define a pantry item as an ingredient that annoys you when it’s not in the house. They have varying levels of importance, of course. If I ran out of salt, that would be a bad day. There’s a wonderful blog called The Perfect Pantry that is all about pantry items. Recently it has featured unsalted butter, white whole wheat flour, and frozen chicken breasts.

Occasionally, an ingredient will step up and, through persistence, ask to be added to the pantry. Most recently, we’ve elected pickled jalapeños, cream, and Eggo waffles. Iris and I are finally getting around to planting cilantro this week. (Apparently you can’t just plant [Penzeys](http://www.penzeys.com/) coriander seeds.) I wish there were a way to keep herbs in the pantry other than growing them.

Some of our favorite pantry meals are:

* yeasted waffles
* spaghetti carbonara
* blueberry pancakes
* bacon-jalapeño pizza
* Safeway potstickers

Cowboy beans come close. They require cilantro. Cilantro, why do you have to be so tasty?

I like summer, because dishes in the dishrack dry really fast.

I mentioned that I had a lettuce-related plan but I was coy about the details.

This week in Culinate…

The omnivore’s salad

We’ve been eating salad a couple times a week since the farmers market started. Iris has even been gnawing on a leaf here and there. I mention this only briefly in the article, but roasted asparagus, cut into one-inch lengths, is a brilliant salad addition. As Laurie notes, in format and texture it’s kind of like avocado.