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