Tis the season...

for foraging and preservation. Here are some photos of our labors.

This is high bush cranberry sauce in the making. We harvested the berries with my herbal group. Then I took off the stems and boiled them til they were mashable. This is them going through the food mill. If we had a more heavy duty mill, we could have skipped the boiling step.

This sauce is SOUR! We add a tablespoon to a couple servings of applesauce for a hint of flavor without making it unpalatable.

We also harvested hazelnuts during the herbal apprenticeship. It took hours to get them all out of their shells. 

We added some peanuts and hickory nuts to make Linda's homemade seaweed,syrup, and nut bars. They are a bit too sweet for me, but neal loves them. I may substitute peanut butter for some of the syrup next time. Anyone have other suggestions. Linda's recipe is on her website: http://www.moonwiseherbs.com/trees-as-food-and-medicine/

Neal took on apple butter as his project. We ended up with 18 pints. Some slightly sweetened and some left tart.

Beautiful, right?

We made "meatloaf cupcakes" with sweet potato "frosting". Omg it was so delicious. Here is the website for that recipe: http://wellnessmama.com/4759/meatloaf-cupcakes/

The current project is apple leather. We skipped the lemon juice in the usual recipes because that is just for preventing browning. We also ditched the sugar. This leather is plenty sweet on its own and I don't want it to be any closer to a dessert than it already is. 

We have batches going in the dehydrator and oven. We will try storing the leather at room temp, in the fridge, and in the freezer to compare how well they last and texture.

An apple a day... For the next 3 years

We have so many apples right now!! It's the year of the apple, the apple moon, the apple village, or something along those lines! We got 1.5 bushels for $7 on Craigslist, 2 bushels from some new friends, and then probably 2 to 3 more bushels from a friend who let us use his cider press and apple orchard (that is in addition to 10 gallons of fresh cider we took home. We have given away 3.5 gallons to friends and family and will probably freeze the rest of it. We are grateful of all the generosity we have been shown these last few weeks. So many apples! Here are some pics of the bounty and our preservation efforts.

Check out all the apples. We did apple sauce in the crockpot... We will be stepping up our game by using Catherine's Nesco next time!

4 trays in the dehydrator. Half peeled and half not. We will see which win the taste test. If it is close, we will do peels-on in the future because it is easier.

This batch started off in the sun oven, but then it got cloudy. The regular oven is faster anyway.

This batch was done exclusively in the regular oven. It is the fastest method by far.

Some of the cider crowding up the fridge. Hehe.

Neal is experimenting with inoculating the cider with lactobacillus. We are hoping for vinegar based on Greg's recommendations.

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.