Making Pickle Relish

whole cucumber. I used Armenian cukes because that is what I had

Cut in half

Remove the seeds

cut into chunks and put in the food processor (or cut finely by hand)

The result

Add salt to bring out the water and let sit for at least an hour

The other ingredients-sweet onion, red onion, green peppers, ripe (yellow and red in this case) and garlic

Like the cukes put through a food processor or chop very fine by hand

this has been salted and is sitting and waiting for as much liquid as possible to be expressed

after sitting for an hour I pressed out the excess liquid in this colander

The brine-salt, sugar (no more than a cup) vinegar and pickling spices

washing jars

Jars being loaded into the canner to be boiled/sterilized

Finished product

Cantaloupe Jam

We had a fabulous melon season. Lots of very high quality melons were grown on our farm. But, sadly, not all the melons were sellable so when life gives you too many melons you eventually make jam (and freeze them as well but we already discussed that here on this blog).

I have had this melon jam idea in my head for a couple of years now but until a few weeks ago I did not get around to making such a jam.But faced with a growing amount of beginning to fester must be used ASAP and I already have filled the freezer with more than enough frozen melon I needed to do something so I looked around the web for a good melon jam recipe and found...none. Not a single melon jam recipe out there. I did find a couple preserve recipes but I had no interest in putting slices of melon into jars filled with a simple syrup. I wanted a real spreadable jam.

So I had to invent a recipe which I did. Fortunately the pectin box had a basic recipe for all jams which is 4 cups fruit, 4 cups sugar and pectin (and maybe some lemon juice). Since I had both regular pectin and low/no sugar pectin (and a lot of both) and a lot of melons I experimented. I found the best results with the low/no sugar pectin and around 6 to 7 cups of fruit an 2 cups of sugar. It had the best flavor, sugar to fruit ratio and set up well. The jam made with regular pectin always set up poorly, even when I paid attention to measurements and used exactly 4 cups of fruit, sugar, etc., etc..

I I used Organic sugar and regular cane sugar and found little difference in taste or how well the jam set up.

For flavoring I used salt and vanilla extract along with 1/4 cup of with either lemon or lime juice plus a TBL of butter which originally I used to keep the foaming to a minimum but used more butter because it added great flavor

so here is the master recipe
4 to 7 cups fruit processed to a smooth foam in a food processor (use only 4 if using regular pectin)
2 to 4 cups sugar
2 TBL vanilla extract
1 TBL butter
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 lime or lemon juice
1 pkg pectin

Prepare according pectin direction than fill hot jars that have been boiled for at least 10 minutes. put on lids and rings and than put in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. Remove from canner and put on a clean towel and let cool at least 12 hours. When cool remove rings, write on lid or label what's in the jar and the date and put in a cabinet.

The Canning Jar Ordeal

I want to make and can some rhubarb/raspberry jam today. I have the fruit, sugar, pectin, lids. But what I do not have in abundance is 1/2 pint and pint jars. I have a lot of quart jars from an auction I went to about 10 years ago where Eugene and I bought something like 35 cases of canning jars in various sizes, brands and ages for $5 (and made $10 on the deal selling the zinc lids to people who wanted the lids only and not all the jars that filled the bed of the pick-up truck we had at the time). At the time, I thought I had a life time supply of jars. I was wrong. Over the years I have broken some, free-cycled some and sold a lot of them full of things like tomato juice, apple sauce and jams and jellies.

So now I am really really short on 1/2 pint and pint jars. You are probably saying Lucy, go out and buy a couple of cases of small jars and be done with it. I wish I could. Last night after the Tuesday farmers market in Oxford we went searching for such jars at Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Kroger's. Not one of these places had small jars. They all have wide mouth quarts and Wal-mart also had small mouth quarts but that is not what I need. This really bummed me out.

Went home and looked around the kitchen to see if I had any small jars and did find 4 pint jars not being used and a couple of 1/2 pint jars with old food in them that are now empty. Later this morning I will go out to the barn and look through the wall of jars and see if there are any 1/2 pint jars out there that I missed. I also will make popovers for breakfast in order to use up the last of some raspberry jam in a pint jar. Hopefully I will find 14 or so small jars and will be able to do this jam project this morning.

Incidentally, if you are a local reader of this blog and have any canning jars you do not want i will gladly take them off you hands. I can use any size, any make.

Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes

Yesterday I believe I finished putting up tomatoes for the year. I did my 3rd 5 gallon pot of sauce which yielded 11 quarts. That will go with the other 20 or so quarts of tomato sauce. I also did some salsa (I do not remember how many jars) and tomato juice (IIRC I have 21 or so jars of that.) Next on the agenda is apple sauce.

I have also been freezing. Right now peppers are the main thing I am freezing as they are coming in. I like to have at least 8 well packed gallon freezer bags of chopped sweet ripe peppers and a couple of bags of roasted peppers to get through winter. So far I have 5 bags of peppers and none of the roasted variety. I am thinking Sunday may be a good day to start a fire in the Webber grill and roast and skin a bunch of peppers. They are so good roasted. They add a wonderful smokiness to any dish you add them to.

Last year I was lucky to get 5 gallon bags. It was a bad pepper year for us-too wet I suppose. Those 5 bags were gone by April meaning we rarely had peppers all spring and most of the summer. I rarely will buy peppers at the store as ripe peppers simply cost too much for my budget (but I understand why they cost so much-a lot can and does happen to a pepper between green stage and full ripe stage and about 1/2 to 2/3 will not be sellable at ripe stage). But because I grow peppers I am used to being able to use a lot of them every time I cook with them.

This year has been a good pepper year and I should have more than enough to get through winter and spring. I already have about as many frozen as all of last year and we are still picking lots and lots of peppers and I will be freezing quite a few more in the next 10 to 20 days.

How to Roast a Pepper

Over a flaming wood fire (you can do this with charcoal but wood gives you a much better flavor and you won't have petrochemical residue left on the peppers from the fire starter. I guess a gas grill will work as well but again there is the flavor issue) put on as many peppers as you can fit. Let the flames blacken the peppers and split the skin. Turn every 15 to 30 seconds (this is fast cooking over high heat). When the peppers are black, flaky and ugly on all sides remove them and place in a paper bag to steam for a 5 to 15 minutes. Bring the bag of peppers inside to the kitchen sink. Take a pepper out of the bag and start removing the skin (which is charred). The skin should come right off. If it does not that means you did not cook the pepper quite long enough. Don't try to re-char it just take some extra time to get the skin off and next time take more time to roast the peppers. Cold running water will help in removal. Once the skin is off slice open the pepper and remove the seeds and the placenta (the thing the seeds are attached to at the top). Now, you can either use the roasted peppers right away or slice them into thin strips and place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them. Once frozen, pop the strips into a well market plastic freezer bag and store for winter use. These peppers can be used anywhere a smoky sweet flavor will work like fried potatoes, chili, macaroni and cheese, soups (I can see using these in a butternut squash soup).
Bon Apatite

Harvesting for Winter

I am waiting for rain that is not coming. A cold front is moving through the region this morning and it was supposed to bring a lot of rain our way but it seems that the rain has fizzled out. C'est la vie. The market garden will have to continue to depend on well water irrigation for now.

It is Wednesday and we have no markets to deal with today and we did not sell many strawberries yesterday at the Tuesday market so today I am going to make strawberry jam, something I have not done in years. I think I will also freeze some green beans and can the apple sauce Eugene made last night since it is going to be reasonably cool today and tonight.

A big part of gardening is being able to put food up for winter. This seems to be a foreign concept to most Americans and that is a huge shame. When I had a CSA, early on I would purposely give members a lot of food and instructions on how to freeze, dry or can the extra food so they would have pure local food in winter time, thus stretching their food dollars. In the ten years I ran a CSA I had maybe 3 members who got that idea. Wot a shame.

I take great joy in putting food by. Yes, it takes time and is often hot sweaty labor but come winter when we are feasting on beans, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, corn, pesto, dried herbs, garlic powder, peas, jams and jellies, applesauce, etc., it is well worth the work done in the heat of summer. It saves us boat loads of money in winter when money is always in short supply for us and we do not have to worry about where our food came from or with what it has been adulterated. That and it is very satisfying to have shelves full of beautiful jars of homemade food and freezers full of produce and chicken that we raised.

If you raise a garden and do not already can dry freeze and otherwise preserve your harvest you should start because otherwise you are not taking full advantage of what your garden is producing. If you buy at farmers markets buy extra and freeze or can it. If you belong o a CSA and cannot eat all the food each week, instead of giving it away or trashing it, put it up for winter. It takes just a few hours per week to do this. Your co-operative extension office will have loads of information on putting food by.

The Victorio

It's almost fall and that means tomato canning time. I have already written about catsup and the wonderful victorio and here is a picture of the victorio with tomatoes that were made into plain tomato sauce.

Today I am canning up probably the last sauce I will make this year, the sauce tomatoes did not yield well at all and many of the plants were crossed with other things so did not produce decent sauce tomatoes at all. I should get 18 or so quarts of sauce in the end and along with a couple of jars from last year plus the frozen sauce we ought to be all right for the winter/spring.

My Victorio strainer is an old model. A 200 that seems to have been replaced by a new and improved 200. I am hoping the parts I need are still around. Mendinghouse.com seems to have the things I need but not all are in stock. And there seem to be a couple of parts I have never possessed (but than I go this from my Father, lightly used, so perhaps they were there at one point back in the mists of time). So I may be looking at not being able to get all the parts I need to get the thing back up to almost new condition. Since I have been using it hard in less than almost new condition I suppose I could continue to do so. It still works quite well.

Homemade Catsup

Every year I try to do a new canning project. Last year it was pickle relish made from lemon cukes (golden relish) and this year it is catsup. I have this book with a lot of pickling recipes in it and it has two catsup recipes. One is for catsup that taste just like Heinz™/Hunts™ catsup so I used that for the familiarity of the taste and because it used more tomatoes than the other recipe as well as a lot of onions which I have an abundance of including several pounds of semi rotten ones that need using ASAP.

So I get out the Victorio Strainer set up (the kitchen tool I can not live without this time of year) and bring in a crate of various tomatoes (red, yellow, pink, striped) that are beginning to go. Than Eugene brings me a bucket of maters that need using before I hit the ones in the crate. Than I find several pounds of green peppers and 5 large onions (actually 8 or 9 medium onions). I prep the onions and peppers for the catsup first by cleaning them and than putting them into the Cuisinart and pureeing them into a frothy green substance. Added a bit of vinegar and let that sit while I put 25 pounds of tomatoes of various colors and flavors through the Victorio Strainer. Added the maters to the green froth and than added the sugar some salt and the rest of the vinegar and put the whole mess (which was by this time in the largest roasting pan I have, one that can hold a 30 pound turkey, aka birdzilla) into a 200˚F oven. The directions said to cook this for 10 hours but I gave it 14 hours and turned up the heat the next morning to 250˚F and the stuff was not a thick and rich catsup but rather a runny sweet and tart tomato sauce. So I took the roasting pan full of sweet and tangy tomato sauce out of the oven and tried to thicken it with corn starch (Rumsford GMO fee corn starch!). This did not work very effectively, it thickened a bit but not much. Probably did not use enough to get the job done. Or maybe I should have used a flour paste...

Any hoo after attempting to thicken the catsup I gave up on that idea and got the canning jars out of the boil canner and proceeded to fill them up with the sweet and tangy tomato sauce, put the lids and rings on and canned up 7 quarts leaving 1 quart extra.

The extra quart I put in a sauce pan and cooked it down on low heat for 3 or 4 hours to see if I could get it thick enuff to call catsup. Nope, could not. So than I decided to try thickening it this time with a flour paste (a couple of table spoons of white flour with water added to it than stirred well into a thin paste or slurry). This worked very well and I had before a substance that tasted a lot like commercial catsup.

So if I do this again I will be changing the recipe quite a bit. I will toss out the corn syrup (don't want no GMO's in my catsup if I can avoid this) and replace with brown sugar (did this in the first batch with good results). I will for go the several days of slow cooking in a low over (will cook over night) and instead use a the flour paste thickener to get the right consistency. I will use a cup more of vinegar (I used rice vinegar rather than the cider vinegar called for because that is what I have in abundance) and perhaps use a bit of balsamic. I will add either garlic powder or fresh pureed garlic and a tablespoon more salt. Than I think I will have an excellent catsup.

I am quite excited to learn how to make my own catsup. It is a condiment we use a lot around here and I have never liked the fact that when eating this I am eating High Fructose Corn syrup, a food additive I try to avoid like the plague but because I use a lot of commercial catsup I do eat. Not to mention we will no longer be spending a couple of dollars a month on the stuff.

Next will be BBQ sauce. I will use roasted ripe peppers, some OJ and bacon in the catsup recipe, maybe some molasses too.

Oh yeah, the catsup I fooled around with on the stove became Sloppy Joe base and it was excellent and that is probably what the first batch will end up being as it is not really catsup.

The Second Circle of Tomato Hell

We have reached the second circle of tomato hell. The place with rivers of boiling tomato juice with glass jars floating in them. Where there are crates of tomatoes with just a few rotting in the bottom of each crate attracting fruit flies and stinking like rotten maters. Where there are mazes of vines to nowhere, falling over from the weight of all the not quite ripe maters hanging on them. where the giagantic hornworms roam freely through the maze of vines devouring all in their path.

Soon we will delve into the 3rd circle but not just yet.

What to Do with Too Much Produce

It is nearly mid August and that means the market garden is in full swing. we are harvesting literally tons of food out of the garden right now. We are harvesting onions, cantaloups, watermelon, acorn squash, green peppers, eggplant, zucchini, basil, cukes, kale, chard, etc..

Things like onions are pretty easy to deal with. Harvest, put on the drying racks and ignore for a few weeks while they cure. Clean them up by removing the dirty layer of skin and the roots than store and/or sell. The winter squashes are also easy to deal with, harvest, wash off any dirt and let cure for a week or two than store.

The tomatoes are not so easy. They are easier to harvest than the long keeping crops but they also are a whole lot more perishable so that means if the sales are slow (and they are) they either have to be composted or made into something. We much prefer to make them into something rather than let them go to the compost. So today I made my first batch of tomato juice out of a wide variety of maters I found either sitting on the kitchen table (they were well on their way to conquering the table for all tomato kind) or going on their way towards compost material in the store about a bushel of tomatoes to be made into juice. The juice has brandywines, basinga, persimmon, moscovich, sunsugar, yellow taxi and big beef maters in it.

Right now it is heating up on the stove and soon I will add some balsamic vinegar, home made garlic powder, worcester sauce and a bit of salt to the juice to finish it and than get out the canner, quart canning jars, rings and lids and can it all up either tonight or tomorrow morning before market. Looks like I will have about 8 to 10 quarts of juice in the end.

Melons present many of the same challenges of the tomatoes, though they do not go bad nearly as quickly and right now are selling a lot better so there are rarely any that need processing this time of year. But a couple of weeks ago that was not the case and I was freezing melons about every day. Of course it is far easier to cut and freeze melons than it is to make tomato juice or sauce. For freezing melons all I do is cut the rind off and than cut the melon into 1" cubes and put them on a cookie sheet and put that into the freezer. When the melon has frozen I put the cubes into a plastic freezer bag and put that back into the freezer.

Basil has been another thing coming in heavily. The volume of the basil has been very very heavy, so much so that even with brisk sales I still have a lot left over. Last Friday I harvested about 6 pounds from one bed. Out of that I sold about 3 pounds and the rest I dried for winter use and sale. The next harvest I am thinking of making a huge batch of pesto and freezing that for winter and maybe even sell some.

Soon I will be dealing with a lot of ripe peppers and will freeze pounds and pounds of them as well as selling as many as possible.

This is the curse and the blessing of having a market garden. At times it produces well beyond what you can sell and than you get to put up food for the winter months when it is really hot outside