Pickles!

Well, I wasn't planning to do this today, but I found we had some time on our hands so we drove to the farmstand where they sell the B-grade cucumbers and peaches.  I bought a half-bushel of odd-sized pickling cucumbers (the freestone peaches will be ready next month, they say) and got home and started to work.

I usually make Kosher-style dill spears, from the recipe in The American Family Cookbook.  This time I made the same recipe but in slices.  I still have 8 quarts of spears from last year, after all.  The recipe calls for cider vinegar, water, salt, garlic, dill seed, and peppercorns.  It's quite easy.  The garlic was from the farm share so was fresh and pungent.  Mmm!  I ended up with 5 quarts of the Kosher slices and one quart has already gone to my parents.

In addition I tackled the green and wax beans from the farm share, with 4 peppers from my garden, one farm share onion and one regular, store-bought, one, some celery and some edamame.  I couldn't find fresh lima or fava beans so I thought I'd try the edamame instead.  The 3-bean salad isn't that colorful because the peppers were green, not red, but it's a great recipe (Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving) and I don't really care what it looks like!  This is also the first time in a while that I didn't add beets.  Haven't gotten any from the share yet.  I made 7 pints and for that I had to add an extra half-recipe of the liquid to fill all the jars.

Now I can get to work on dinner!

Happy Mother's Day!

Today we finally held the long awaited and several-times-delayed birthday party, just family, and combined it with a small Mother's Day celebration. I brought out lots of canned goods for this one! One quart of Strawberry Lemonade concentrate, which I mixed with water and ice because I forgot to buy seltzer water when I was at the store this morning. We also used up the last jar of 3-Bean salad, the last jar of the bread and butter pickles made with rice vinegar, and the last jar of peach-mint salsa. Plus I brought out some of the dill pickles we'd opened last night. I'm making lots of room in my pantry for this summer!
The cake was a hit, and I think the entire thing will be gone by the end of the day. The little ladybugs were essentially sugar bombs. Even though it was a LOT of work, I am very glad I made the fondant; it tastes so much better!

Helping Hand

Another reason why this hobby is great is that I can prepare food for people and it won't go bad sitting on the shelf. In other words, when someone is under the weather and people are showing up with food, mine won't take up precious fridge and freezer space. Such is the situation now, so I made a double batch of khoresh and put up 2 quarts which were delivered yesterday. I'm glad to be able to help.

We had company last night for dinner (which is why I made a double batch) and, as a side dish, I put out a pickle tray: toorshi, dilled carrots (spicy!), bread & butter pickles (the ones with the rice vinegar), and pickled fiddleheads. I also set out a bowl of the 3-bean salad with the beets. When I'd made that particular recipe with golden beets, the color leeched out of the beets. I thought the red beets wouldn't do that, but they did. Strange to see white beets and know that they used to be red! But it was a perfect accompaniment to the khoresh and rice. Kind of like having a chutney. Which I didn't remember I had, or I would have served that, too!

Serious Multitasking

The farm share pickup was today so I went after work (in my work clothes, which must have looked pretty odd to everyone there in shorts, tank tops, and sandals, as we were picking beans...) and got the goodies: 1 quart of beans, 1 pt. of fava beans, lettuce, salad greens, 1 pattipan squash, 2 kohlrabi, 8 tiny beets (oh no! not enough!), lots of carrots, small red potatoes, dill, collard greens and some onions (a variety of green onion but I don't recall the name, it was weird, though). My sister-in-law had given me her share since I was away last week and I think she's still working through last week's share. So I got it all, and it's WAY too much! Time to start canning...

I got home around 5, ran to the store for some protein for dinner, and got to work. Simultaneously, I was working on 3 bean salad (which is really 2 beans plus a couple of beets), pickled beets and cabbage (the cabbage was left over from 2 weeks ago), dinner (salad, potatoes with onions and dill), and dilled carrots. I don't have enough counter space or pots for all of this!

A few things to crow about: The bean salad includes 2 small peppers from my garden! The salad included tomatoes, red and yellow, from my garden! Whee!

The bean salad, pickled beets and dilled carrot recipies all came from 3 consecutive pages of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, but I made a few alterations. The obvious one was that the 3 bean salad has beets, and different proportions of the rest of the veggies. Plus fava beans instead of lima beans, which I precooked this time since last time I used fava beans they were tough. I then took the leftover pickling solution, strained out the mustard and celery seeds, and used them with pickling spice to flavor the beets, and added more vinegar, water and sugar with the spices to make the beets (to which I added cabbage, another alteration). Since I didn't have garlic, I used some of the funny onions instead for the dilled carrots, and used the green parts of the dill since I didn't pick the flowers. I'm sure it will be fine.
Suffice to say I was cooking until 11 pm. I even managed to slip the carrots in for the last 10 minutes of the beet processing time, which allowed me a little rest. I still have a lot of greens left over for meals this week.

Christmas Eve Dinner

For Christmas eve dinner I made my favorite dish: Pork Roast. Mmm! Which gave me the opportunity to use some of the homemade applesauce. We'd gone apple picking in the fall and I used my Roma food mill to make about 17 jars of applesauce: with and without sugar, with brown sugar, pink, not pink, with or without cinnamon. We like variety! Tonight's jar was pink, with sugar. We also used some of the three bean salad I made last summer. I put golden beets in it since I didn't have 3 beans. It's green beans, shell beans, and the beets. Strangely enough, the beets are no longer golden. The color seems to have leached out into the pickling solution. Still good, though...

For dessert we had blackberry ice cream with the chocolate raspberry sundae sauce - heated a few spoonfuls for 30 seconds in the microwave and spooned it over the ice cream. Wow!