Cheap preservation

Last week we found a farm stand while driving through the country that offered c-h-e-a-p produce. 

We got 8 little peppers,10 pounds of pears, and a head of cabbage for $8! Crazy right? We are trying

 out some fun recipes this week, including 5 pints of pickled pears :)

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/09/pickled-seckel-pears-recipe.html

We hope to make this chutney over the weekend. We've recently become huge chutney fans... So expect more 

chutney photos from us!

http://bellejarcanning.com/2011/10/27/pear-ginger-chutney-definitely-fall-here/

Anne and Dennis were kind enough to gift us with more slicer tomatoes again this week. Since we devoloped a 

new process for processing them (haha)...  We thought we would share some pictures. We are huge fans of canning 

sauce because it is by far easiest for us to make. We don't even take the peels off! Before this week, we cored 

the tomatoes, let them cook down in the crockpot and then depending on our moods, either blended them up

or just skipped right ahead to canning. This box had a full layer of tomatoes when we started.

This week we blended the tomatoes immediately after coring them. That way we didn't have to wait for the 

tomatoes to burst their skins before starting to boil down, plus we like the consistency, PLUS then we didn't have to

deal with blending boiling hot liquids. 

Catherine was generous enough to lend us a crockpot plus we had this one of our own so we were able to cook these babies down in just a little over 12 hours (it is a thin sauce though.. I'd say a thick sauce would have been 2 more hours or so).

The final product: four more quarts of tomato sauce :)

Cidering

We made apple cider with our friends, Anne and Dennis, a week ago. Greg David was kind enough to share his old fashioned press with us. Here is the photo documentary of the day.

The press is washed and assembled under the market tent. Earlier in the week we picked apples from the tree at the back of this picture and the one to the left of it just out of view.

After grinding down the apples, we slowly pressed the juices out.

If you look closely, you can see the first yellow jackets in the bucket. They loved the juice and there were way more around later in the day.

Neal took his turn with the pressing.

In the end, we had 4 gallons of fresh cider and 7 gallons that are fermenting into hard cider. Yum yum yum. This is all we have left.

Putting up

We have been busy busy busy with summer fun, gardening, and canning. The preservation will probably continue into October so the blog may continue to be sporadic. Here is a glimpse of some of the projects we have been working on:

8 pints of dill pickle spears. There were plenty more pickles where these came from, but we had to give them to the chickens because they were huge, bloated, and yellowing. Luckily, the chickens seem to love them :)

http://www.mccormick.com/Recipes/Sauces/Dill-Pickle-Spears

Ground cherry chutney.... Yum! This was our first experiment with putting ground cherries up. We may repeat this recipe if we are able to glean more produce from our friends' farm. Neal ate a good deal of the ground cherries straight, and the rest went into a sweet refrigerator salsa.

http://www.edibleparadise.com/canning-and-preserving/89-chutneys-relishes-and-fruit-butters/972-ground-cherry-chutney.html

4 quarts of tomato sauce from about 25 or 30 pounds of heirloom tomato seconds. Kind of a shame to use such distinctly tasty tomatoes all in a sauce, but they weren't going to last long, are easily sauced, and freezer space is limited. We also made a roasted veggie salsa with the rest of the tomatoes plus garlic, onions, and red bell peppers. 

http://oneparticularkitchen.com/2009/05/19/salsa/

We are doing our first fermented veggie of the year here. Traditional pickles brined for at least 3 weeks. We'll see how it goes. Once the root veggies and cabbage are ready, we hope to have lots of ferments going. I just love that sour taste!

http://www.pickyourown.org/pickles_oldfashionedbarrel.htm

We are collaborating with some friends tomorrow to make cider. Wish us luck!

Preserves!

Neal and I canned 7 pints of blueberries, 3 half pints of blueberry jam, and 1.5 pints of raspberry jam. We were able to leave out white sugar and just add a touch of homemade maple syrup. We even made our own liquid pectin from Catherine's crab apples. Below is the blueberry jam boiling down. Learned to use a bigger pot in the future!

Here is the second batch of jam plus one jam that had to be reprocessed due to not sealing properly.

Here is the homemade liquid pectin process. For more details, see: http://www.buildanark.net/index.php?pages/Making%2520Your%2520Own%2520Pectin!.html

Pick and wash crab apples. These ones are cherry size.

Add water and cook down until the apples fall apart and are mashable.

Strain the liquid pectin.

Reheat pectin and place in warmed jar.

All that work for one pint of pectin (good for jamming about 6 cups of fruit. I want to do a bigger batch next time 

to make it worth the cleanup effort

Let the harvest begin...

Calendula flowers from our friends, Anne and Dennis, from a farm about 25 minutes away. http://regenerativeroots.com/

Some of the last of this batch of sweet peas. We like them grilled with a Thai inspired peanut dipping sauce... Mmmm!

There is a lot more dill in the garden yet. Anyone have good dilly recipes to share with us?

This is our experiment with drying lamb's quarter leaves. We weeded it out of the garden and can hopefully save it to add to soups and such in the winter.

Neal and I picked 13 pints of blueberries at Jelli's market yesterday. We saved one pint for eating fresh, dehydrated 3 pints, froze 3 pints, canned 3 pints, and made 3 pints worth of fruit leather. I hope to go back to Jelli's with my friend Becky to pick raspberries later this week.

We gathered all the extra juices from the blueberries and cherries...

...for more popsicles! This time in ice cube trays. What a treat!

Neal has had a busy week: sewing,

making sourdough bread, 

and care taking of the bees and chickens. We have no idea what was happening with this egg.

Broody hens and new treats

Traveling post today while we head southwest in the car to Neal's family reunion. In recent days we have been debating which is worse: mosquito alley or heat extremes. I personally don't mind the heat compared to the swarms of Mosquitos on the farm. They even figure out how to sneak inside the lodge to bite us... So frustrating. I've been using plantain poultices to help with the itching and swelling.   Today was breezy so I only got 3 bites all day... Woohoo.

Neal found one of our white chickens sitting on almost three dozen eggs in the storage area of the hen house. We knew she had been sneaking out of the coop everyday but we weren't sure why. If she keeps being broody we may get some fertilized eggs for her to hatch.

Neal put all the eggs in water to see which ones floated. We tossed the floaters because they are likely rotten. 6 bad eggs and over 2 dozen good ones!

It's a bit hard to see our makeshift Popsicle here. We made it in a measuring cup with cherry juice that had pooled at the bottom of the bag of pitted cherries. Tart and delicious! Round two is already solidifying in the freezer in an ice cube tray. That batch was made from juice we strained from cooked cherries, currants(from the farm), and black raspberries (also from the farm). We added a touch of honey but they will still be pleasantly tart. The cooked fruit went into hand pies that we cooked on the grill. They fell apart a bit bit we will eat them as a fruit crumble for breakfast while camping. Yumm!

In other news, we finally got our own bike rack for the car today so we are done with both borrowing racks and with trying to cram two bikes into the trunk of the Honda. While at the bike shop. We also got a new bike for me. The old one was one Neal got as a graduation present for me off Craig's list. It has been just slightly wrong for me this whole time because the frame is too large for me.i was so excited about the new bike that I biked the six miles home from the shop while neal installed the rack on the car and drove home. Super excited to try out the bike at the campground this weekend. If anyone wants the old bike, let me know. I'd prefer to sell it to a friend over dealing with Craigslist. Neal and I put money into fixing it up last summer so it rides pretty well.

When Alicia's Gone

We took the week off off blogging to celebrate the Independence Day holiday with the Crowe family in Eureka, Il.  Over the course of two weeks Alicia's siblings have come home to spend some time together.  I had to go back to work,  but did find some time to brew beer and pick cherries.  Wednesday on my way back to the farm I saw a sign for cherries along the road.  I was actually expecting a phone call from my mom but the thought of cherries intrigued me.  I pulled up to the farm and there was only a handful of cars parked in the grass.  The orchard http://www.steffenscherryorchard.com/ has been around since 1981 and they are continually expanding as adding more trees.  After the summer drought and frost after things blossomed last year this harvest was the best in a long time from what everyone was saying.  When you get there you are given a bucket a rope and a hook.  You can tie the rope around your waist and then hang the bucket while you climb the ladders to pick. I picked 5 buckets that were 6 quarts each. 

 If you want them pitted and washed you can take them to the barn where they have 2 stainless steel sinks to wash them.  Then they have a large scale commercial pitted that pits them excellently.  I took home about 5 or 6 gallons of cherries and juice. 

The 

I decide to dehydrate some to make"cherry raisins".  I used a regular dehydrator, the oven on low and our solar dehydrator.  Had I been around all day to have the solar dehydrator track the sun it would have worked great.    The time in the oven (overnight was just a bit much) and would in the future decrease the temp some and move them about more frequently so that both sides were evenly cooked.

The other thing I did the same night as dehydrating cherries was to make two batches of beer.  I made a Scottish Ale and a Stout.  I had tried before to make the ale on an outdoor cookstove but it was taking forever to boil so I brought it inside and in the process broke a glass thermometer.  Therefore that batch was ruined.  Luckily I had only started the process and lost a few pounds of grains.  I had to  search for the recipe online and made it.  By the next day it was actively fermenting and bubbling.

This time the thermometer is in tact.

Once the brewing time is finished it's time to cool the wort as quickly as possible so that its an appropriate temperature for the yeast.  It is important to do it because it causes the solids to break and fall out of the solution so that when I transfer it top the fermenting vessel they don't come with.  The rapid cooling also prevents other bacteria from taking a hold before the desired yeast strain can.  In addition it prevents the formation of "dimethyl sulfide (DMS) production. DMS is a volatile substance produced in some worts, mostly those made from lager malts. DMS smells like cooked corn and is usually considered a beer fault, although it is noticeable and intentional in some commercial beers (byo.com)."

In this picture the cold water is flowing through the hose on the left and goes through the sealed copper coil and comes out warm to hot on the right hose.  This was the first time I was able to do it inside.  It was very successful in bring down about 3 gallons of boiling wort to 70 degrees in about 20minutes.  After it was chilled I transferred it to a fermenting vessel and pitched in the yeast.  Then it was time to wait for the fermentation to begin.