Harmony fun

Below are some pictures of a recent evening at Harmony house. It was fun to listen to music and work on projects together (although I will admit that I was mostly just taking pictures this time around).

Mikaya and Catherine peeled and sliced so many sweet potatoes.

I believe they came in a huge donation of produce to Casa. The frozen, prepped sweet potatoes will be much appreciated come winter.

We ate many of them as scrumptious fries that night however. Hehe.

Neal and Cullom bottling some beer.

These bottles are waiting to be filled.

"Fall is the most wonderful time of the year"

Neal's uncle cliff visited over the fall equinox. Here we were particularly impressed with his opened faced grilled cheese sandwiches.

We got 30 lbs of "damaged" apples from an orchard 25 minutes away for just $7.50, and Cliff helped us process them into applesauce.

We love this tool for coring, peeling, and slicing all at once.

If we had felt really motivated, we could have used these apple peels to make apple cider vinegar. Maybe next time...

Recently, we have been experimenting with ferments. This is a typical saurkraut here. We also made sour beets with burdock root.

These are traditional style cucumber pickles (the type people would have eaten before canned dill pickles were invented). The little cukes sat in a salt water brine for a few weeks and naturally fermented on their own. We like the book "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz for ferment recipes. Apparently other people love it to because there were 15 holds on the library copies we wanted to check out. We opted just to buy the book online since it was apparently so awesome.

Catherine graciously shared her Concord grapes with us and we used them to make juice. There was originally talk of canning some of the juice for later, but we drank it all before that happened. Hehe. We also made a wild grape juice to share with folks at Casa. It was so intense and sour that it required dilution and sweetening to be palatable to most folks.

There will probably be lots more pictures of our fall harvesting and preservations in the coming weeks, but I'm thinking the posting will be more sporadic. Hang in there.

September harvesting

Here are some pictures of what we have been harvesting these last couple weeks.

Warted green Hubbard squash. I think there are four or five more out in the garden yet.

Popcorn. It's drying in the potting shed now.

Burdock root. We have added it to kraut so far, and we will use it in stirfrys and pickles in the future.

Beets still making it in the garden bed.

Ever bearing strawberries from the crowns we planted this year

More cucumbers. Next year we will just pick one type of cuke.

The tomatoes were late, but they've been consistent since August.

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