I'm in the Big D all week on business, so I won't be posting much.

But I did get an email from Craig that's worth sharing. He tells me there's a saying in French that sums up my life's philosophy:

La vie est dure sans confiture.

Which means:

Life without jam is tough.

Truer words were never spoken.

I'm leaving for Dallas tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. and will be gone for a week. This evening I faced a refrigerator full of spoilable food and was reminded why people starting canning in the first place: to preserve the good stuff before it rots. That's why this blog is Saving the Season, ya'll.

The first thing was to use the extra Meyer lemons, ABOVE, for GUEST BLOGGER AMANDA MILLER'S SALT-PRESERVED LEMONS. It is the most pleasantly fragrant work you can imagine.

And then I did a confit of wild mushrooms, using the stunning wild hens-of-the-woods I got from LA Funghi at the Culver City Farmer's Market on Tuesday. The proprietor is an odd duck, but he's got the best selection of wild mushrooms—all harvested in Humbolt County—that I've seen in SoCal.

A confit is when you cook something in fat, then preserve it by covering it in the cooking fat. In this case, it's a short-term preserve for keeping in the fridge. (NB: mushrooms are a low-acid food and cannot be safely canned using the water-bath method.) I looked at recipes by Linda Ziedrich, aka Linda the Great, and Thomas Keller. His is overly fussy but gives good guidance.

The basic idea is that you trim a pound of mushrooms and then gently heat them for a few minutes in a cup of warm olive oil that has been seasoned with fresh herbs. As you turn them in the hot oil, the mushrooms will sweat and wilt and finally collapse. Turn off the heat, toss with salt, pepper and a good tablespoon of vinegar and let them cool in their juices. Then spoon them into a jar, top up with more oil if necessary and store in the refrigerator for up to a month. The secret is the vinegar.

Fruit is a bounty, and sometimes it's a burden. Since I got back from my Palm Springs citrus odyssey, I've felt guilty every time I walked thorugh the kitchen without stopping to roll up my sleeves. That's because I came home with a grocery bag full of foraged lemons, and they sat there on the counter demanding attention and threatening to throw a moldy tantrum if they didn't get it. How do I find myself into these situations?

What happened was that driving home, I kept seeing groves of oranges in the distance off the 210 freeway and all that citrus made me think of a little stand of lemon trees I'd once seen along a residential street in Upland. I needed to stretch my legs anyway, so I stopped.

What I hadn't noticed before is that some of those trees were growing orange lemons, just like the curiosities I bought at Mud Creek several weeks ago.

They were crying out for the chance to star in a new production of THREE-LEMON MARMALADE. I selected five or six pounds of the best and the brightest.

Then on Wednesday, I got Meyer lemons and sweet lemons at the Farmers Market, and that night stirred up a double batch of multi-lemon marm. With some trepidation, I threw in a tiny bit of the fearsome bergamot: a strip of zest about 3/4" wide and 2 inches long added halfway through the reducing and removed 3 or 4 minutes later. It thoroughly infused the whole double batch—six pounds of fruit—with a noticeable bergamot aroma. What an unbelievable fruit.

YIELD

6 lbs fruit yielded 8 pints marmalade

I'm having the ceiling repaired in the living room at Greenvalley, and everything is covered in plastic. The effect yesterday morning was eerie and beautiful.

Look what showed itself in the yard Monday: the first California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, of the year. Another new season has come to Greenvalley: wildflower season. It's one of my favorites.

A few weeks back, I took a big jar of marmalade to Luke's birthday party as a present. His sister asked me what's the difference between marmalade and jam, and I gave an earnest answer that wasn't quite the response she was looking for. "What's the difference between marmalade and jam?," you see, was the set-up for a dirty joke, the punchline to which I couldn't possibly repeat here.

But it's still a good question.

The other morning I was on the porch when the crows suddenly appeared in the upper branches of the crepe myrtle tree.

I grew up in the South but learned to ski from a Yankee. His name was Rob Follit, and he was a special friend of my mother's. For a time I thought he might become my stepfather. Even after that time passed, Rob still accepted a certain responsibility for his ex-girlfriend's fatherless son, and he taught me things that a teenaged boy needs to know, like how to execute an Eskimo roll in a kayak and how to ski. Rob first took me skiing in North Carolina when I was about 10—and later to Vermont and Utah—and I of course was an ingrate. When I fell off my skis, which was often, I'd get mad at him for making me do things that I couldn't yet do. He was patient. "If you're not falling," he said, "you're not learning."

Sunday afternoon at Greenvalley, Rob's words came back to me as I ruined 14 pints of Seville orange marmalade.

You have one guess...

Scott has been in New York where it is snowy and cold this time of year. When he got back on Wednesday, he was so over winter. He went straight to the Parker in Palm Springs for sunshine therapy.

I drove out to there Friday night for dinner, and the next morning I didn't quite believe my bleary eyes.

"Is that snow?," I asked as we walked outside in shorts and sunglasses and looked up to see the white-capped San Jacinto Mountains looming directly above us.

"It's not sugar," Scott said. "And it's not Sweet'N Low."