Eating From the Garden in February!

Amazingly, it'sFebruary, and we're are still eating meals occasionally that include some form of garden produce from last summer. For example, last night we had beef and barley stew made with homegrown potatoes, onions, garlic, and thyme. With starting up my new job mid-summer, I really didn't have time to do as much canning and preserving as I would normally do. However, I actually got to teach a class called 'Preserving The Harvest' in August last year. I did a little canning, drying, and freezing so I would have demos and food to taste for the class.

I still have a crate of these banana fingerling potatoes in the basement. As well as a crate of the largest 'Yukon Gold' potatoes I've ever seen. My potato harvest was huge (a.k.a. scary huge) last year!

I dehydrated tons of Principe Borghese tomatoes last summer so I could make a sun-dried tomato dip for my preserving class. I've barely made a dent in them!

I grew lots and lots of soybeans last year and froze several gallon size bags of edamame. These are so good boiled and salted!

Some of my onions have gotten mushy in storage (I should really put them down in the basement instead of in the kitchen), but many are still nice and firm. I grew heading onions for the first time last year. I've only ever planted onions sets and harvested them as green onions. Last year I grew 'Ailsa Craig' and was pleased to get nice large bulbs that seem to hold up fairly well in storage. This year I'm going to grow 'Copra' because they are known for their storage.

I still have about a dozen heads of garlic left, probably not enough to last me until next harvest. I braided them and they're hanging in my kitchen. The braids look so pretty that it's hard to start cutting heads off of them. I probably also didn't plant enough garlic last year, so I'll run out again next winter. I seem to do that every year. This fall I should just plant what seems like a ridiculous amount and then it will end up being just enough!

No-Peel Nectarine Jam

I don't know about you, but I prefer nectarines over peaches. In my experience, the odds of getting a mealy peach is much higher than getting a mealy nectarine. In addition, nectarines are awesome because you don't have to deal with peach skin, which tastes like dryer lint.

This was one of the few jam recipes I made this summer where I actually paid for fruit, but it only cost about $3 for 3 pounds. I bought approximately 9 rock-hard nectarines and threw them into a paper bag with an old banana to speed up the ripening process. Both bananas and nectarines are climacteric fruits, which means they release ethylene while ripening (and the ethylene from the over-ripe banana helps speed up ripening of the neighboring nectarines). 

I used the Ball recipe for peach/pear jam (4 cups or 3 pounds fruit, 5 cups sugar, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and regular powdered pectin). I didn't peel the nectarines because I'm lazy and I couldn't find any skin in the finished product anyway.

I was pretty lucky with the store-bought fruit because not a single fruit was mealy. The jam tastes somewhat similar to apricot jam. In the future I want to try Pomona's Universal Pectin because I felt like the sharp nectarine flavor was a little diluted with all the sugar. In fact, next year I want to switch entirely over to Pomona's. Although my jam yield will be lower, I think I purchased almost 25 pounds of sugar this year just for jam recipes!

Autumn Olive Jam

I was surprised that there's really only one recipe for Autumn Olive Jam floating around on the internet. While the recipe from Dreams and Bones is perfectly fine, I didn't have no-sugar-added pectin on hand and I didn't want to make a run to the store just for that. Therefore, my Autumn Olive Jam is based on the Ball recipe for berry jams (5 cups of mashed fruit with 7 cups of sugar and regular powdered pectin).

First I washed and drained the berries. Then I cooked approximately 9 cups of berries with one cup water for about 5 minutes (or until mushy). 

This glop was run through my squeezo (see it in action here, or here) to remove the seeds and twigs. I only have the apple/tomato screen that came with the food mill and the sizeable Autumn Olive seeds were pushing it to the limit, but it still worked (eventually).

The seeds were incredibly clean after only one pass through the machine. Usually I run stuff through three or four times before this happens (must be the big seeds).

I think the color and texture may be a little off-putting (it kinds of looks like ketchup, or congealed blood), but it tastes good (tart and somewhat unique).  It's definitely a novelty jam, but I think some of my like-minded friends will appreciate a jar.

Miscellaneous Canning Projects

It turns out that I prefer store-bought spaghetti sauce over my homemade stuff. I'm not sure what it is, but my homemade sauce tastes really acidic and sometimes it gives me heartburn. I've been offloading as much of it on my parents as possible (they seem to like it), but I don't know if I'll ever go to the bother of canning sauce again. Unfortunately, I planted more paste tomato plants this year than I know what to do with. Here's a small portion of this years harvest:

I thought I'd try canning whole tomatoes and see if I like the flavor better. It doesn't take that long to turn whole tomatoes into sauce on the stovetop. I used the hot-pack method, which means you don't have to process the jars as long. Unfortunately, by the time I heated my peeled tomatoes up, they turned into mush. So instead of whole tomatoes, I basically canned extremely watery sauce. Oh well, I can drain out the water and use it anyway.

I also finally got around to making red raspberry jam. I've been working for a lab all summer scouting for insects in a high-tunnel raspberry production system. One of the perks of the job is that I got to pick and keep as many raspberries as I want. I had never made red raspberry jam before because the berries are pretty pricey, so now was my chance to do it with free fruit!

I think I like it more than the black raspberry jam I make each year (from foraged berries). The flavor of the red jam is a bit cleaner and brighter than the black jam.

Easy Apple Butter

Apparently I'm not much of an applesauce eater because I still had the vast majority of the jars I canned a year ago in my pantry. I heard about a friend of mine turning applesauce into apple butter using her crockpot, so I thought I'd give it a try. The advantage of using a crockpot is that you can pretty much ignore it all day without worrying about it burning. I'm hoping that by re-processing the applesauce, I'll be extending its shelf-life too (I could just be making this up though). I used the pickyourown.org apple butter instructions as a guideline, but I didn't have all the spices on hand.

I dumped about four pints of applesauce (from the batch that I didn't burn) into the crockpot, added about a half a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon. 

I left the crockpot to simmer away on the highest setting all afternoon. Since the whole point is to reduce the volume of the applesauce, I left the lid ajar so that the condensation could escape easily. I still didn't have the desired thickness by bedtime, so I popped the crock in the fridge over night. Before plugging the crock pot in the next morning and put the glop in a blender to get it silky smooth. After several more hours (this is a slow process) it was thick enough. I poured it into jars and processed them in a water-bath canner for 10 minutes.

I'm hoping to give the majority of these away as gifts in the near future. I think apple butter is an easier sell than applesauce. This stuff would be great on a cinnamon raisin bagel or mixed into oatmeal. Yum!

Chicken Garbage Disposal

I didn't want to admit it to myself, but one of the two batches of applesauce I made last fall got scorched...and the burned flavor is still there. I've avoided dealing with the botched batch for almost a year and I finally came up with a solution that doesn't make me feel wasteful.

Turns out, chickens love burned applesauce!

Now I have a way to dispose of my last 5 quarts of the stuff (they've been taking up precious pantry space too). The non-burned batch of applesauce was turned into apple butter, but I'll save that for another post.

Accidental Sweet and Sour Sauce (a.k.a. Sweet Red Pepper and Garlic Jelly)

In the midst of my Yellow Tomato Jam session a few nights ago, I realized I had all the ingredients to make yet another savory jam. I picked up a few patio bell pepper plants at work last spring and they're finally cranking out some fruit (although they are quite small). I also have a couple hefty bundles of garlic that I ripped straight out of the ground and hastily shoved (dirt and all) onto a shelf in my basement. As I mentioned before, I was feeling really guilty about my near total neglect for my vegetable garden this summer and the lack of garden produce I've managed to incorporate into my cooking (again, thank-you Master's degree)...hence, Sweet Red Pepper and Garlic Jelly (from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving).

I added a little red food coloring because I didn't think the aspic-like jelly looked particularly appetizing. By the time I got my act together and got all my jars and lids ready, the majority of the red pepper had nearly dissolved (wasn't expecting that), but the garlic stayed intact. I added a little black pepper and red pepper flakes because I thought some heat would be nice. 

It tastes remarkably like garlicky sweet and sour sauce, which I'm a little bummed about. Sweet and sour sauce is basically a syrup of sugar, vinegar, and bell pepper colored with either food dye or paprika (so, the exact same ingredients as the recipe I was using). Why wasn't I warned? I think Ball should consider renaming this recipe.

At least it's pretty? Maybe homemade egg rolls are in my near future.

Yellow Tomato Jam

I had an impromptu jam session the other night. I had been feeling guilty for the lack of tomato-based canning goodies being cranked out this summer (thank-you Master's Thesis submission process) and I was inspired by a recipe for Orange Tomato Jam with Smoked Paprika from Food in Jars. However, being an impromptu jam session, I didn't have all the ingredients for that recipe and ended up making the Food in Jars Yellow Tomato and Basil Jam instead.

I ran out to the garden with my trusty garage sale colander (love this thing) and picked all my golden beauties.  I planted over 30 varieties of heirlooms this year, so this jam was made with a motley crew of sungold, taxi, big rainbow, azoychka, valencia, moonglow, kellogg's breakfast, persimmon, and yellow brandywine). 

I was nervous about adding the basil suggested in the recipe. The jam was so incredibly sweet on its own, you could practically put it on a PB&J. However, I wanted to truly delve into the realm of savory jams, so I added the basil. It adds a nice flavor and I like the little ribbons of green (I did my best attempt at a chiffonade). I'm looking forward to trying this out on a bagel and cream cheese or as a sweet and sticky glaze on meat. Maybe I'll even try that PB&J!

Thrift Store Canning Jars

I made a trip to one of the many thrift stores in my area yesterday to look for canning jars. I was lucky this time, I found four 1.5 pint jars, two pint jars, and two 8 oz jars. At $0.30 a pop, I got all this for $2.54 including tax!

However, the 1.5 pint Atlas jars are kind of weird, so I looked them up online. It turns out that the Atlas Mason jars are just commercial spaghetti sauce jars used by the Classico brand. I think these jars are simply a gimmick used by Classico to make their product look more legit. Honestly though, can they really put the word "mason" on their jars, if they aren't actually canning jars?

I know I've water-bath canned with Atlas jars before with no trouble.  I just assumed Atlas was a brand that had gone out of business, since you can't buy them anywhere. But now I'm wondering if I should really be using them for canning? From what I've found online, plenty of people use these for canning with great success, but I've also heard that they have a coating inside that can wear off and eventually cause breakage.

I'm not sure what to do...

Homemade Applesauce

I picked up a bushel of Empire apples at the MSU horticulture farm fruit sale last Friday. I wanted to get a mixture of apples for making applesauce, but we weren't allowed to mix bushels together. I was told that Empire would be a good combination of tart and sweet (I like somewhat tart applesauce and I didn't want to have to add any extra sugar).

After looking at these photos, I'm really glad I washed the apples...look at all that bluish pesticide residue!

Since I have my awesome Roma food strainer, I didn't have to peel or core my apples. I just hacked each apple into about 8 pieces.

The apple chunks then went into a big pot with a little bit of water to simmer and soften.

After the apples were softened, I transferred them to the food strainer.

A simple turn of the crank, and the apples were pureed and the skins, cores, and seeds removed.

Here's a video of my food strainer in action (please ignore my filthy stovetop...it's canning season you know).

All the skins, cores, and seeds were separated from the apple pulp. This mess went into my compost bin. I thought about giving it to the chickens, but apple seeds contain cyanide compounds that can be bad in large quantities (such as this).

The pureed apples were then brought to a boil on the stove and then canned in water bath canner.

Two batches later and I got 8 pints and 6 quarts of applesauce! And, I still have another 8-10 pounds of apples left.

Well-Stocked Pantry

Okay, so maybe all the items in my pseudo-pantry aren't edible, but these great handmade shelves (put in by a previous owner under the basement staircase) are coming in handy for storing all my canned goods this summer.

I've managed to fill six shelves so far (with another batch of tomato sauce on the way). 

I've really been cranking out the tomato sauce this year. I'm on my fifth batch!

In addition to tomato sauce (bottom right), I also tried dilly beans (bottom left) and tomatillo salsa (top right) this summer. After gifting many jars of my humongous batch of apricot jam (top left), I'm finally getting down to a more reasonable supply.

In addition to the apricot jam, I also made blackberry apricot (bottom left), black raspberry (top right, my favorite), and sweet cherry jelly (top left). The six jars on the right side of the bottom shelf are leftovers from the 2009 and 2010. They still taste just fine, so I'm not too worried about their advancing age.

Jam Session

I don't really have time to go into my recent jam making sessions in depth, but I thought I'd at least post some pictures of the process.

I picked between 9 and 10 pounds of black raspberries over the course of two trips to the woods and a few trips to my small backyard berry patch.

My lovely Roma food strainer. I don't own the screen that is meant for processing berries, but I used the apple/tomato screen with success (I just had to dismantle the whole thing halfway through and unclog the seeds from the screen). 

The first run through the strainer I didn't get much pulp and I was a little worried!

I ran the waste material back through the strainer three or four times and got a lot more of the pulp out.

By the end, the waste product was almost entirely seeds.

I put the pulp in the fridge until canning time and I was surprised to see that it had completely jelled on its own. I still followed the jam recipe and added pectin though.

I can't actually remember if this photo shows raspberry jam or black cherry jam. I also ran my pitted black cherries through the food strainer. Cherries have such a high water content that the strained product was very thin, so I ended up making cherry jelly instead of jam.

Counter chaos full of canning supplies.