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.

More Beef Jerky

I made another batch of beef jerky using my new food dehydrator. This time I used bottom round instead of top round. Bottom round was on sale at the grocery store, so I thought I'd try it out. There is a lot more fat in the bottom round than the top round, so hopefully the jerky won't be too gristle-filled.

This is what 4 pounds of beef looks like.

I mixed my own marinade this time (I ran out of the packaged stuff that came with the dehydrator). I used Memphis steak seasoning, garlic salt, pepper, chili powder, and soy sauce.

The slices of beef were a bit thicker this time, so they will take longer to dry. My dehydrator is pretty efficient though and I expect it to take less than 12 hours.

Homemade Beef Jerky

After making dried pineapple, the next thing I wanted to do with my new dehydrator was to make beef jerky. I remember making beef jerky as a kid with our infomercial food dehydrator. It took several days to dry, but was delicious.

Top round sliced and ready for jerky

I bought 3 pounds of top round for $5 a pound. The butcher sliced the meat for me into thin strips (no charge). I marinated the meat using the jerky spice mix that came with my dehydrator plus some Worcestershire sauce and temari (fancy soy sauce), but I skipped the jerky cure packets (containing salt and sodium nitrite). We never used a cure when I was a kid and it doesn't sound like an absolutely necessary step. I suppose if you were making ground meat jerky (with more germs and critters in the meat) and were intending to store the finished product unrefrigerated I might want to use a cure. We always refrigerated our jerky, so spoilage wasn't much of an issue.

Marinating jerky meat

After marinating for 12+ hours, I put the meat slices onto my dehydrator trays. I started the dehydrator before leaving for work and the jerky was done by the time I got home. In all honesty, I probably should have stopped the dehydrator a couple of hours earlier, but the jerky was fine.

Raw marinated beef in the dehydrator

My 3 pound top round dried down to only 19.4 ounces! That's a 60% reduction in weight.

For my next batch of jerky, I think I'll try my own spice and marinade mix. The pre-made spice mix was very noticeable on some pieces of jerky, but almost flavorless on other pieces. I should also try a different cut of meat to see if there is much of a difference.

Finished jerky

Dehydrated Pineapple Battle: Canned versus Fresh (Part 2)

The fresh and canned pineapple I started to dehydrate a couple days ago didn't take long to dry. The fresh pineapple was done faster, but that's probably because I cut the pieces thinner than the canned stuff.

In terms of flavor, both the canned and fresh are very good. If I have to cast a definitive vote, I guess it would be for the fresh pineapple simply because the canned pineapple is almost too cloyingly sweet.

Dried fresh pineapple

Dried canned pineapple

It was pretty staggering how much the pineapple shrank in the dehydrator and how much water weight was lost. The fresh pineapple cost me $3 and dried down to only 5.6 ounces. The canned pineapple cost me $1.25 and dried down to 2.6 ounces. So in terms of value, the dried fresh pineapple cost 53.6 cents per ounce, while the dried canned pineapple cost 48.1 cents per ounce. Surprisingly, the canned pineapple was a better value. However, I bought the canned pineapple on sale. At regular price (about $1.50) the canned pineapple wouldn't have been the better value (at 57.7 cents per ounce).

P.S. I didn't weigh the dried mango, but it hardly amounted to anything! Making dried mango must be fairly expensive (but yummy).

Dehydrated Pineapple Battle: Canned versus Fresh (Part 1)

The first thing I wanted to make with my new food dehydrator was dried pineapple. I remember making this as a kid and it was very tasty. I was wondering if canned or fresh pineapple would be superior when dried (in terms of both value and flavor), so I'm putting them to the test.

The average 20 oz can of pineapple costs about $1 to $1.50 depending on the brand. The average fresh pineapple costs $3 to $4 depending on the season. After they are dehydrated I will do a taste test as well as compare the cost per dried ounce to see which is a better value. I'm also drying a mango just to see how it works out.

Mango, canned pineapple, fresh pineapple

One can of pineapple contains 10 rings

One fresh pineapple sliced into thin strips

Fresh and canned pineapple in my food dehydrator

Making Pumpkin Puree

I got a fun new kitchen toy for my birthday this year!

This happens to be a food strainer, specifically a Roma Food Strainer and Sauce Maker. This type of gadget is often referred to as a Squeezo (although that is technically the brand name for a particular, and very very expensive, food strainer). Squeezos can be used to make spaghetti sauce, salsa, mashed potatoes, vegetable or fruit purees, jams, and juices. Since I do a lot of canning, a Squeezo is very handy.

Today I made pumpkin puree from one of my jarrahdale pumpkins. Over the course of about 24 hours, this particular pumpkin started to go soft and mushy, so I cooked it up as soon as possible.

My green jarrahdale pumpkin turned orange. Time to make puree!

I removed the seeds and stem from the pumpkin, but left the stringy pumpkin guts and skin intact. After chopping into large chunks, the pumpkin was boiled until very soft. I strained and cooled the pumpkin slightly (part of my Squeezo are made from plastic, so I don't want them to melt). Then the pumpkin chunks went into the Squeezo. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly and easily the process went. The strainer removes all the skins and stringy bits from the pumpkin and send them out a separate chute.

Boiling pumpkin

Food strainer at work (the skins and waste comes out the chute on the left hand side of the photo).

Overall, one jarrahdale pumpkin produced almost exactly 4 pounds of puree. I froze the puree in 2 cup (1 pound) portions. I have three more of these pumpkins, so eventually I'll have 16 pounds of puree! I look forward to making a variety of pumpkin-laden baked goods and maybe some pumpkin soup.

Left: pumpkin puree; Right: pumpkin waste

One of my favorite recipes is pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. They are very moist and cakey. These cookies are especially good when made with dark chocolate chips and lots of cinnamon. More on these cookies in the future.

P.S. The standard screen that comes with the machine is supposed to be for applesauce and tomatoes, but it worked just fine for pumpkin. You can purchase extra screens designed for pumpkin, berries, salsa, and grape juice. I have a feeling that the standard screen will work for just about all of these (with the exception of grape juice of course). I'll find out next year if the standard screen is small enough to remove berry seeds.