New Food: Pomona's Universal Pectin

When it was apparent that our apricot tree was going to have an abundant crop this year, I prepared to make some jam. I had plenty of bottles, lids, and rings, but I needed some pectin. Up to now my favorite has been Sure-Jell Premium Fruit Pectin Light. It uses less sugar, but the amount of sugar is still quite high--about 3/4 cup sugar per 1 cup apricots.

Since I've been trying to eat healthier this year, I decided to do a little more investigating and came across Pomona's Universal Pectin. It's available from Azure Standard and Amazon
(and probably from many other stores, but I live over an hour from a grocery store so have limited choices).

If you've made jam, you probably know how the main brands (Ball, Sure-Jell), tell you how to follow the recipe to a T. No substitutions, changes, nada. When you read the Pomona's instructions, you get a totally different feeling. They tell you you're welcome to develop your own recipes and give you some helpful hints. They even tell you how to use other sweeteners like honey, maple sugar, juice concentrate, sucanat, xylitol and stevia.

I wasn't feeling quite brave enough to make my own recipe, but I was willing to follow one of theirs. They have three main categories: Cooked recipes with low sugar or honey, No-cook freezer recipes, and cooked "all fruit" recipes. I've tried the cooked recipes with honey and the cooked "all fruit" recipes, with concentrated apple juice sweetening the jam. Both have turned out great, and neither have any white sugar added. Yippee!

The reason that Pomona's can get away with no white sugar is that it is citrus based. The pectin is extracted from the peel of a lime, lemon, or orange. It activates with calcium water (which you mix up with the included packet).

The jam that we made tastes fruitier with the Pomona pectin, which makes sense because there really is more fruit in it. I highly recommend this pectin, and find that not only is it healthier, it's also cheaper, because one box makes more jam than the other brands of pectin. What a win-win. This is the only pectin I'm going to be using from now on. And with two big boxes of fruit arriving later this month, I'll be ready!

p.s. For more of my adventures in new, healthy foods, click here.

This post includes an affiliate link to Amazon. Should you click on this link and decide to purchase anything, I will receive a small commission  and you will have my sincere thanks for supporting Desert Survivor! 

Tips for Watching the Perseid Meteor Shower with Kids

Desert Boy holding a meteorite

You've probably heard that the peak of the Perseid meteor shower is tonight. Are you ready to watch this exciting natural phenomenon? Here are some tips to make the most of it.

1. Find a Dark Spot

We are lucky out in the rural desert to have a very, very dark place to watch the meteor shower. However, we even have some stray lights around. So to make it as dark as possible, we'll try to position ourselves to use buildings to block out that extraneous light. Tip: out in the West, the moon will set around 10:00, so it will be even darker after then. (You can find your moon and sun times for your area here.) Also, use red flashlights or regular flashlights covered with red tissue paper to preserve your night vision. It can take 15-20 minutes to get your eyes accustomed to the dark!

2. Get Comfortable

I've gone for night hikes to watch meteor showers (partly to stay warm!), but perhaps the best way is to sit down or lie down. We're planning on hanging out on air mattresses in the back yard with sleeping bags and pillows. That way if the kids fall asleep early, we can still enjoy the meteor shower. 

3. Be Patient

The Perseid meteor shower is expected to have 80-100 meteors per hour. That's over one a minute. But that still leaves about 40 seconds of every minute with nothing. That can be difficult for little kids (and sometimes adults) to wait. Things that might help are to look at the constellations and listen to stories about them, to join a meteor viewing party so there are more people to talk to, or to play games about where the next meteor might be. (Hint: this is called the Perseid meteor shower because many of the meteoroids appear to originate from the constellation Perseus, which is in the northeast sky under the "W" of Casseiopeia.)

Hope you see some good meteors! (And if you happen to get lucky enough to have a meteorite land near you, send it to me!)

Definitions from The Free Dictionary:

Meteor: A bright trail or streak that appears in the sky when a meteoroid is heated to incandescence by friction with the earth's atmosphere. Also called falling star, meteor burst, shooting star.

Meteoroid: A solid body, moving in space, that is smaller than an asteroid and at least as large as a speck of dust.

Meteorite: A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to the earth's surface from outer space.

The Perplexing Plum Tree

 My husband noted that a tree near our house was producing fruit. He had never seen it produce fruit before, so we went and took a closer look.

 The fruit came in two sizes, the larger about an inch and a half in diameter, the smaller about the size of  a cherry. We discussed if this could be a Potawatomi Plum, but neither of us was sure. Potawatomi plums (Prunus munsoniana) are native to the southeast, but were reportedly brought by miners and Mormons to the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin. I did a bit of Internet searching to find more, but ended up more confused!

Here's a closeup of the fruits. As you can see by the fruits in the background, many of them were split. If you know anything more, please leave a comment.

And what about the taste? My husband said he had eaten one a few days earlier, and he was still alive, so I tried a few. They tasted sort of like a plum, but left a cottony feeling in the mouth, which isn't all that pleasant. Perhaps these would be better in jams.

Survey on Pregnancy and High Elevation

My five-month pregnant friend at 13,000 feet elevation

I've been out hiking to mountain tops this week with a friend who is five months pregnant. During one of our hikes, we got in a conversation about high elevation exposure while pregnant. My friend conducts fieldwork on mountain tops. Her doctor had looked into the literature, but hadn't found much information, so had cleared her for staying two weeks above 10,000 feet. For her next jaunt into the mountains, her doctor recommended that she spend the evenings at a lower elevation to make sure that her oxygen levels would resaturate in case her baby was having any stress during the days. My friend was hiking as well as I was, so I was really impressed!

Between hikes, I had a chance to check my email and saw a request from two doctors to post a link to a survey about pregnancy, exercise, and high elevation on my blog. It's not like you can really run a controlled experiment on high elevation pregnancy exposure ("hey, you pregnant lady, go spend two months above 10,000 feet and tell us how you and your baby do, you may or may not have some consequences"). However, this survey can gather some information that may provide doctors with a little more data for making recommendations in the future.

I filled out the survey, and if you'd like to, just click on the link below.

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Looking For Female Participants For a Research Survey on Pregnancy, Exercise and High Altitude Exposure

Very little is known about the safety of travel and exercise at high altitude during pregnancy. Furthermore, although exercise is considered safe during pregnancy some activities, such as downhill skiing, are discouraged and many women modify their exercise regimes during pregnancy
We are conducting a research project to study what kind of exercise women participate in during pregnancy and whether they travel to high altitude during pregnancy. Our goal is to use the information obtained in the survey results to provide advice to physicians and their pregnant patients who want to travel to high elevations. If you are physically active and have been pregnant you may be able to provide useful information for our study, which is being run jointly through the University of Washington and the University of Colorado.

If you choose to participate, you will find a link to the anonymous on-line survey at the bottom of this email. The survey will take 15-20 minutes to complete and does not require you to provide any personal information.

Eligible participants are women who have completed a pregnancy and are physically active. You do not need to have been to high altitude during pregnancy to participate. If you are currently pregnant with your first pregnancy, please wait until after delivery to complete the survey.

Participation in this study is voluntary. You may decline to answer any question in the survey. All of the information you provide in the survey will remain anonymous. Although you will not benefit directly from this survey, we anticipate that information learned from the survey will help physicians and pregnant women who wish to travel and exercise at high altitude.

If you have any questions, feel free to email us at linda.keyes@aya.yale.edu oraluks@u.washington.edu, although please be reminded that the confidentiality of emails cannot be guaranteed. We appreciate your time and effort in completing this survey and look forward to reviewing the information you provide.

Click here to complete this survey: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/aluks/204130
If the link does not work, you can copy and paste it in your web browser.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO CLICK ON "SUBMIT" AT THE END OF THE SURVEY TO ENSURE THAT YOUR ANSWERS ARE ALL SAVED PROPERLY.

Sincerely,
Linda E. Keyes, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor, Emergency Medicine
University of Colorado, Denver

Andrew M. Luks, MD
Associate Professor, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
University of Washington

Summertime Swimming

 School starts in about a week, so we've been trying to squeeze in as much summertime fun as we can. The hot temperatures have made it easy to agree to go to the swimming hole, where the kids also enjoy digging in the sand.

 Desert Girl was sporting a new swimsuit, which she called a "zucchini." She was sure that was the name of it.

 Isaac was having good success making sand castles.

 The dogs were having a great time, too.

 The fun factor ramped up when the kids made their own "jumping boards." The water depth in the swimming hole varies quite a bit, from just a couple inches to about four feet. It's actually a settling pond, where the water slows down before it heads down to the fields below via a pipe. It's quite interesting to see how the substrate changes, from rocky where the stream enters the pond, to sandy, to fine sediment that becomes very mucky. I don't like the mucky parts, especially when my foot sinks in several inches. The rest is nice, though.

 "Ready, set, go!"

Ava loved to splash!

 Then the big kids wanted to go into the deeper water. Desert Boy has learned to back float and doggy paddle better this summer, so I feel more comfortable with him around water. He still has a lot to learn though, so I'm sure to remind him of that.

 Henry is a natural swimmer, but even he gets worn out and needs time to go get his nose sandy.

It was a fun afternoon. Eventually we got cold enough in the mountain stream that we had to go home to warm up. That's a nice feeling on a hot summer afternoon!