Truely Blessed

Fig preserves. In the back you can see salsa and tomato juice.

This summer has been a blur of visitors and food preservation. How blessed we are to have such wonderful friends and family to visit. With the exception of a few days, we've had visitors all summer. Boy does that ever help to chase away our homesickness. Our home feels so full (in a good way). In addition to being able to visit with and cook for, we've also been able to bring lots of our family and friends to our farmers market and introduce them to the idea of local food. So exciting.

We have also been blessed many times by our neighbors who have shared with us the abundance from their gardens. We've been blessed with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash (by the truckload, it seems :), blueberries (literally by the gallon) and this week figs (25 pounds yesterday, plus another 15 pounds last week that we made into preserves to share with our extended family). We have been preserving this blessing as quickly as we can. Most days find the dehydrator going all day. We have veggies for soup, lots of tomatoes, figs, peppers both hot and sweet, potatoes and blueberries all dehydrated and ready to be used in the off season (mmmmm . . . dried blueberries in oatmeal - I can almost taste it now).

We've also frozen lots of fruits (peaches, blueberries, a few strawberries and some figs) and veggies (squash, zucchini, corn and even pesto). The fruit we will use in smoothies, pancakes and pies. The veggies will be used mostly as side dishes.

And it seems that at least a few times a week, we've been firing up the water bath canner to preserve something in canning jars. So far its been mostly the same thing over and over, but I'm grateful because it is stuff we eat a lot of and will need many jars of in the off seasons. We've made peach syrup, salsa - lots and lots of salsa, garden tomato juice (like V-8) and fig preserves. Once we take care of all of these figs we were given, I'm hoping to put up some more salsa and some tomato sauce/ puree. Then we are going to get to work on making some pickles. We've also been offered some pears (they are not yet ready to harvest) and hope to make pear sauce out of what we don't eat fresh. It is comforting to know that we have some locally grown and home preserved foods set aside for the time when there is less fresh produce available at the market or from the garden.

And speaking of gardens, my little garden is growing nicely. We have been able to harvest several cucumbers and yellow pear tomatoes and the peas are growing quite nicely. I think they will begin flowering soon. It has been fun having our garden survive to harvest :)

The chickens are still laying well, even in the heat. We are still getting an average of about 9 eggs each day. It has been such a blessing to have eggs to share with those who share their garden produce with us and to send home with our guests.

Making Salsa

On Thursday of last week, we picked up 25 lbs of tomatoes from a farmer at the market and used some to make salsa.

We made two batches, 11 pints in all. The rest of the tomatoes are going to become juice. Canning season has begun :)

Farmers Market: May 14, 2011

The market is offering better variety as the weeks go by. Today, I came home with everything in the picture as well as chicken, beef and milk. Clockwise from the left, we got bulb onions, peaches, purple broccoli, English cucumbers, red and Yukon gold potatoes and yellow squash.

Today everything we ate was local. In fact, the only thing consumed in our house that was not local was our coffee, and I soon hope to start getting it at the market as well, as we have a local coffee roaster at the market now. We had only two meals today, brunch and dinner. For brunch we had eggs from our hens cooked in butter from the market. On the side we had caramelized onions and yellow squash, also cooked in butter from the market. For dinner, we had hamburger patties with more caramelized onions (we could eat them with a spoon 3 times a day - we LOVE them!!), pan fried potatoes and peaches for dessert. Lately, we are finding it easier to have at least one meal per day and portions of the rest of our meals sourced from local growers or producers.

I am hoping that next week I can start buying from the market in quantities large enough to begin preserving. I want to start with peaches and yellow squash, prepping both for the freezer. Last year we had 12 quarts of yellow squash in the freezer and 6 quarts of peaches. We could easily double the amount of both, as we use the peaches in smoothies and the squash in soup and also to caramelize. I have already started dehydrating potatoes and have a quart jar filled with them. I plan to try dehydrating some onions at the end of the week if we have any left.

Are you preserving anything in your kitchen?

Preserving

What are you preserving this week? It has been "Pickle Week" here at the cabin. Over the weekend, we were the recipients of a plastic grocery bag filled with cucumbers (from some wonderful friends), many of which became dill pickle spears (pictured below). We also were given some tomatoes by one of hubby's co-workers and those became the jar of tomato puree pictured below.



Also in this picture are banana peppers, okra (both from our neighbor), peaches (from hubby's co-worker who sent a whole shopping bag full) was planning on putting up peaches in syrup, but we ended up eating most of them), some cucumbers (friend), a huge squash (from our neighbor - she said it is wonderful seeded and cubed and cooked with some brown sugar and cinnamon. I hope to try it, as that sounds wonderful), and another huge zucchini which will also be shredded and put in the freezer for zucchini bread.


Today I made pickled banana peppers and processed 6 half-pints (to the left in the photo). I also put some, unprocessed, in the fridge to use in the next week or so (big jar in photo) - yum!! I still need to decide what to do with the okra. I will probably just cook it down with onions and peppers and put it in the freezer for gumbo this fall.

It is harder to get to the farmer's market this year because we are 40 miles away from the closest one, so our wonderful neighbors' gifts have been such a blessing.

What are you preserving this week?

Its Strawberry season!!

We've been eating lots of strawberries and now that we are starting to get tired of eating them fresh, I'm starting to look for ways to preserve them. We made a batch of strawberry jam (5 half-pints and 1 pint) which will be all the strawberry jam we could possibly eat in a year. We are going to freeze some whole for smoothies and make fruit leather out of some. Hopefully we will also have the opportunity to go to a U-Pick strawberry farm in the next week or two. In the picture below, you can see the jars of strawberry jam and also two jars of something else.
Those are two pint jars of red onion pickles. Well, technically, the Ball Blue Book calls it Vinegared Red Onions, but we just call them pickles. We (especially Hubby) like these on sandwiches and salads. Yummy!

Isn't that pretty :)

I have a couple of questions for comments. First, do you usually do anything else with strawberries to preserve them? The only other thing I can think of is maybe strawberry syrup, which I think would be nice in lemonade. My second question is are you preserving anything now?

Pears, Pears and More Pears

I spent most of the day yesterday canning pears off and on. Our house is small and the kitchen is small so the batches must also be small. It took time, but it was fun and well worth the effort. Here are the jars of pears so far:

There will be more as I am only about 2/3 of the way through the basket of pears - yay!! I figure that this many jars should last us at least 6 months.
Here is the pantry of home canned items before the pears were added. There really is no room for more, so I'll need to clear off another shelf :o)

The rest of the pears will have to wait until Monday as we have a busy weekend planned. Tomorrow we are headed to the farmer's market. I may try to get some cukes if there are any to make some pickles. What are you putting up at your house?

Putting Up Pears

Look what Bryan came home with last night from work. His coworkers are some of the most generous people I've ever met and one of them sent this home with him. He often comes home with treasures like this.
If I had to guess, by how difficult it was to carry, I'd say this is about 50 pounds of pears!! Here is a picture of one of the average sized pears in my hand, to give some perspective.


Aren't they beautiful! We are going to eat some fresh, as we, just this year, have learned to appreciate fresh pears. The rest is becoming pear sauce. Here are pictures of the first batch.




It is just delicious and this batch filled 2 and 1/2 pints. I have more pears cooking in the crock pot and another saucepan right now and I hope to can them this afternoon. I'm thinking that this second batch, which is larger than the first, will fill at least 4 pints. These two batches have gotten us only about 1/3 of the way through the basket of pears! I'm so excited - the boys love applesauce muffins (we have been using pear sauce in them lately) and applesauce cake (which we can also use pear sauce to make). I am especially pleased because food security is so important to me - the more we can be self sufficient, the less we need to depend on the national food system and the less likely we are to be affected by outbreaks.

Why Bother with Food Storeage and Preserving?

My husbands reaction to seeing so many jars of salsa (a small laugh and a confused expression) made me realize that even someone who lives with me and hears my thoughts and rants might not understand what I'm doing, so I'm betting if you surf on in to this blog and see all the food storage posts, it might not make sense to you either. Why do I bother making and canning so much when I can just go to the grocery store and buy it later if I need it? Here are a few of the reasons:

1. Locally grown produce tastes better and makes better tasting salsa, preserves, pickles, etc. It has gotten so that we won't eat produce out of season and much of it we won't even get from the grocery store because the taste is so different (inferior). If we can preserve some of it at its peak of flavor, then we can have it at its best even when the season is over.

2. I can make it for less. I can make fig preserves for the cost of the jar lid, sugar and energy to cook and waterbath can it (around twenty five cents per pint). I can make the salsa for about $1.00 per pint and that includes the cost of buying the vine-ripened, delicious tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc.

3. I can help to support the local community by buying lots of produce from local farmers. What I buy now will help my local farmers to pay their bills and feed their family in the winter when they are not selling anything. This small act might be the difference between the farmer being able to continue farming or having to sell the farm to find other work. Every dollar I spend with a farmer, instead of at the grocery store, is a full dollar that goes to the farmer, as opposed to the mere pennies on the dollar that go to the farmer through more conventional grocery store purchases.

4. We are learning and practicing skills that will help my family become more self-sufficient. We hope to own land soon so that we can take more responsibility for producing much of our own food. When that happens we will be doing a lot of food preservation and it will help that my kids and I are practiced at it since so many other things we will be doing will be new to us.

5. I know what is in it. I don't have to wonder if that ingredient I cannot pronounce is something that I want my children eating, and I don't have to keep constant watch over HFCS or Trans-Fats on ingredient lists because I know what is in it, since I made it.

6. Food security. With products being recalled on a regular basis for containing things like e coli, salmonella, listeria and lead, I feel better knowing the people who grow our food and knowing how it was grown. The tomatoes I preserve will not be recalled.

It is a lot of work, but in my opinion, it is work worth doing.

More Food Storeage Pictures

Here is the salsa (8 pints) from this weekend's farmer's market tomatoes. Also pictured are 3 pints of fig preserves we made from the fig trees on the property. This makes 5 pints plus the one's we've eaten fresh off the tree and the one's we dehydrated. The trees are still going strong, so I'm sure we'll have many more jars of figs before its all said and done.

Here are the Roma tomatoes and some figs still in the oven drying. Please ignore the oven-in-need-of-cleaning. If the kids like the figs this way, we'll make more. I'd also like to make a few more trays of "sun dried" tomatoes.

Menu Plan Monday - 7-13-09

I've decided to try an experiment with our grocery shopping. Instead of a weekly grocery run I'm trying shopping for two weeks of groceries at a time with dh stopping on his way home from work for milk as we need it and the boys and I hitting the farmer's market twice a week for fresh produce. We used to shop this way and not only was it less stress because of fewer shopping trips, but we also spent less. So yesterday was the day of the big shopping trip. It went well and we spent just slightly more than we usually spend for one week. I'm interested to see how this pans out.

This morning, I am dehydrating tomatoes and figs. We like "sun dried" tomatoes in quick bread (tomato basil bread) and on pizza, so I thought it would be fun to make our own (in the oven) with locally grown tomatoes. And I've heard that dried figs are delicious, so we're giving that a try, too. It would be nice to have another way to preserve and snack on figs. I think I'll also try fig fruit leather. As a kid, one of my friends used to always have this every summer (her grandmother made it) and we enjoyed it. Maybe my kids will, too. We'll try it out and see. They surely enjoyed the blueberry leather we made last week - it barely lasted a day. We've also been preserving some of our farmer's market finds as pickles and also salsa. Ideally, we'd like to preserve a year's worth. It will be interesting to see if we can do it.

Our menu for this week (locally grown in bold):

Breakfast (with repeats):
Eggs
French Toast (eggs)
Yogurt with plum jam
Oatmeal with butter, cinnamon and a little brown sugar or honey

Lunch (one fruit and one veggie):
Leftovers
Turkey Sandwiches
Broccoli Cheese Soup
Chicken Noodle Soup

Snacks:
Watermelon
Cantaloupe
Plums
Chips and Salsa
Hummus and Pita
Figs (my youngest and I both love them right off the tree)
Homemade bread (gonna try soaked bread) and honey butter
Yogurt with plum jam or with maple syrup
Popcorn (popped on the stove top in coconut oil with celtic sea salt and pastured butter - the smell of this cooking can always bring the kids into the kitchen, no matter what they are doing - so yummy!)
Carrots and cukes
Cookies (not sure what kind)
Quick bread (probably banana nut - again)
Strawberry/ blueberry smoothie
Cherries

Dinner (we will be dining out a few times this week)
Roasted Chicken, green salad, cantaloupe

Tuna Burgers, tomato and cuke salad, sauted squash

Chicken Noodle Soup (onions, squash), green salad

Pizza (caramelized onion, bacon and ham, or cheese and black olive), side salad

Grass-fed Beef burgers (caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato), broccoli

Leftovers



Head over to I'm an Organizing Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

Saturday Farmer's Market and Canning Question

Tomatoes, plums, peppers, okra, cucumber, pickles, cherry jam, cookies, and cantaloupe (including cantaloupe slices, one of which we ate at the market). The banana peppers and okra were pickled on Saturday. The large tomatoes and jalapeno became salsa on Sunday (picture coming soon). The Roma tomatoes will be dehydrated on Monday along with some of the figs from the trees out back.

Ok, here is my canning question. Why is the vinegar cloudy in the banana peppers (pictured below)? Its the same vinegar that was used in the okra which did not get cloudy. The cloudiness is gone now, but I'd like to know what caused it and if its still safe to use.

Yesterday, No. Today, Yes!!

Yesterday, I checked the fig tree and there were no figs ready, although they were starting to look like they might be full sized. Today, I happened to glance at them when walking past and saw that lots were ripe! Yay!


When I went inside to change from my jeans into my shorts and get a bowl, the boys got to work and by the time I was outside again, they were done collecting the ripe ones. Instead of cooking dinner, I cooked up the figs.
Four cups of figs made one pint and a little more. I canned the one pint and the "little more" will got into the fridge to be used up this week.


I just went out to inspect the trees again and found another 2 cups or so of ripe figs. I brought them in and will probably wait until tomorrow or day after tomorrow to see if we can get to 6 cups of figs before canning again. That way, I would probably get 2 full pints to can.

We use the preserved figs on toast, with biscuits, in yogurt (dh discovered this a few weeks ago and its so yummy), in fig cobbler and we are going to try fig pinwheels and fig sweet dough hand pies. What do you do with your fig preserves?

Salsa and Pickled Banana Peppers

Keeping it real: notice the messy counter and toaster oven behind the canning jars.

It smells like a Mexican restaurant in here, today. I tried out this recipe for salsa and this one for pickled banana peppers. Since we have some very particular people who live in this house (Hubby and oldest son), I decided to try the salsa recipe out in a small batch, only make half a recipe. Well, it passed the taste test for #1 son and knowing dh's tastes like I do, I am sure it will pass there as well. I made the recipe as written (a new thing for me - I usually alter everything, lol) except that I ran everything through the food processor for a less chunky salsa (as requested by #1 son).

I cannot believe how easy it was to make. I've avoided making salsa for years thinking it would be difficult and not come out tasting very good. Boy was I ever wrong. Next market, I plan to get enough produce to make a full batch and can it. If I can do this 6 times this summer, that would give us enough salsa (one pint per week) to last us through next summer, when the tomatoes show up at the market again. We use at least that much salsa, since chips and salsa are our salty snack of choice and we use salsa in cooking sometimes, too. Will I make that much salsa? I doubt it - but I'm sure going to try. Now to learn how to make the chips, lol.

The pickled banana peppers will be a lot easier to make a year's worth, since dh is the only one who eats them. I think one pint per month will be plenty, and since I already have two, the rest could be done in one canning session. Let's just hope the farmer's have enough peppers.

One thing I did not try yet, is the link Paula recommended for lacto-fermented salsa. I have a question for you, Paula. Is the whey called for in the recipe just regular whey, like what I strain out of our yogurt or is it something else? I want to try this, too and hope to do that as soon as possible.

Okay, so what else are you all preserving that I should try?

Food Storage: Homemade Fig Preserves

This morning, while everyone else was still asleep, I decided to make fig preserves out of the figs we bought at the farmer's market. The smell of the figs cooking brought me back 30 years to the summers we spent at my grandparents' house. Its funny how quickly a scent can bring you back to times past. I wonder what scents will bring back special memories to my kids when they are adults.



This is one of the huge figs I bought at the farmer's market mid week. I really hope the farmer has more tomorrow. We ate a few as a snack and some of them are going to be paired with goat cheese and prosciutto tonight. Three cups of them went into a pot with sugar and a little water . . .
And became fig preserves. Most of these preserves will be used in Fig Cobbler tomorrow. Since I made a small batch and am planning to use most of it in a recipe tomorrow, I did not bother canning them. I guess technically it is not food storage, but its practice for what's coming in the next few weeks. I'm sure I'll post a picture of the finished cobbler, if I remember to take one before we eat the whole thing.
We also tried the preserves with yogurt and discovered a new obsession. Really, I would never have thought to try it, but Bryan suggested it and turns out, its delicious.

Every summer we can as many pints of fig preserves as possible, so hopefully there will be pictures of those jars to post in a few weeks.

Food Storage

One thing I am trying to learn more about is traditional food storage. I have some experience with canning, freezing and drying, but I know that if our lives depended upon my skills, we'd be in serious trouble. Therefore, I want to learn all that I can about food storage. This week, I've been drying our Greek Oregano. We don't use a lot of oregano, and our plant is very prolific with its growth, so we have lots extra. Here is some of the oregano drying inside. Once it is completely dry, it will be stored in a half-pint mason jar. Do you do any food preservation and storage? I'd love to hear about what you do. Please share links if you've posted about your efforts at food preservation. In addition to a weekly garden update, I will try to post a weekly food storage update. That might keep me accountable. If I think someone is expecting an update, maybe I won't put off preserving our garden produce. :o) It might work.