Mars appreciation

In addition to Mars night at the Museum of Science, there's also a special Open Night at the BU Observatory, with a lecture about Mars preceding the open telescope time, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is offering three nights of lectures and Mars viewing, tonight through Thursday.

In general, BU opens its observatory to the public every (clear) Wednesday night. Harvard offers lectures and an open observatory every third Thursday (sky viewing only if the weather's clear).

All of these are free.
I think I should start a calendar of ongoing free (and very-low-cost) things around Boston.

Jam, etc.

This weekend I was gifted with lots of wonderful, locally-picked blueberries. I ate a lot of them :-), but wanted to do something just a bit more elaborate with the rest. I didn't want to make a dessert (I don't have people coming over anytime soon, so I'd be the one eating all of it...), so decided jam would be the thing. I don't have any luck whatsoever with pectin, though, and blueberries don't have enough pectin to gel on their own, so I decided to make a cran-blueberry jam; cranberries have lots of pectin. Plus I'm a cranberry freak (I have cranberries in my freezer pretty much all the time, just to have cranberries available when I want them).

I took the rest of the blueberries (about twice the volume of a bag of cranberries, I think), a bag of cranberries, and a cup and a half of sugar. No water, no liquid at all, other than the juice in the fruit itself, which was plenty! The mass boiled vigorously, and I canned the molten purpleness, getting a pint and three half-pints, plus a little extra, for tasting. It's not very tart, but not incredibly sweet, either. Hooray for cran-blueberry jam!

As I headed to bed, I thought about other local fruit I could make into cran-X jam. Peaches would work. So would apricots. If I ever got enough raspberries that I'd want to make jam, that would be a nice red combination. Apples are more for applesauce and apple butter, not jam. Hm. What about melon? I know it's incredibly juicy (when ripe), but maybe the cranberry pectin would be enough. Cran-cantaloupe jam, anyone? (Watermelon seems the wrong consistency. And I'm not dealing with all those embedded seeds, either.)

( king's rice )

( you name it )

Vegetable love (week 12)

A box and two bags, this week, to hold

• 2 watermelons! (I'm told some are yellow, some red, and some white.)
  
• 5 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, all different varieties
  
• a (very full) pint of sungold cherry tomatoes
  
• 4 pounds of onions
  
• 5 tomatillos
  
• a bunch of basil
  
• a bunch of parsley
  
• 4 green peppers
  
• 2 heads of what looks like romaine
  
• a pound of carrots (though it looks like more)
  
• a black bell eggplant

I never know what to do with tomatillos, so any suggestions are welcome.