Sometimes, Plans Change

Today I was going to make grape jelly. I have over 13 cups of grape juice prepared, and that's enough for 2 batches of jelly plus some for drinking. I bought sugar and jars. And then I went to pick up my farm share.

In the share, I could get peaches and pears in addition to the usual fruits: melons and raspberries. As the allotment of berries was only 1 cup, and I had all these lovely fresh peaches, I was reminded of peach melba jam and thought maybe I'd make some. That means putting off the grape jelly, and the applesauce I was also thinking about making, but that's OK. Those ingredients will keep longer than the berries and peaches will.

The berries, when crushed, made about half a cup. To this I added 3.5 cups of peaches, 2 T. lemon juice, 5.5 cups sugar and a package of pectin. This made exactly 6.5 cups of jam.  Last time I made this flavor, I used more raspberries than peaches and one couldn't even taste the peaches. I am not sure I can taste the peaches this time, either! Maybe it needs to mellow out some.

Tonight for dinner we will have the last of the portions of paté I made, with the cornichons and the spruce paste, along with cheese, bread and fruit. After spending over an hour in the sun picking vegetables, I'm worn out!

Edit: After dinner, I got the 20 small tomatoes peeled and into a quart jar in the canner, just as I did last week. There are just too many tomatoes for us to eat and I found these jars of peeled, whole tomatoes really useful in the past year.

Many Balls in the Air

Today there are a bunch of updates on several ongoing projects:

Bees: they are doing well. It appears they are about 1/3 through another comb. There are so many bees out foraging that they arrive back at the hive at a rate of about 3-4 bees per second. The pollen they carry ranges from white all the way to a deep olive green, which might be an aster species. I'm worried, though, that they won't have enough time to build up their honey stores before the fall. Unless something amazing happens in the next month, I will likely have to feed them over the winter.

Grapes: while we were at the Y last week I noticed some tiny wild grapes. This week I picked about 1.5 pounds with the help of my younger child. While not enough to do anything with at the moment, they are washed and in the freezer waiting until I have at least 3 pounds so I can make jelly.

Cornichons: the recipe for these said they would be ready in a month, so I made a date on the calendar for today. I thawed some paté and spruce paste and we had that, with the cornichons, cheeses, bread, grapes, and chilled steamed green beans in a vinaigrette, for our dinner. They were spicy and crisp, mmm! The grapes were weird - elongated pointy things called "Witch Fingers." Have you ever seen them? Well, as I've previously mentioned, I'm a sucker for unusual foods or if they have limited availability. They taste like any other grape. Which is a good thing.

Pickles and jam ready to be gifted.

Wintergreen ice cream: I made brownies today, partly for us and partly for the guys who are still toiling away on our water main. This morning they started to work in front of the driveway before I knew they were there and so I had to go rushing out and ask them to stop long enough for me to get my car out. They were kind enough to do so (my heart sank as I ran out and watched the backhoe take a huge bite out of the pavement...but not so much that I couldn't get my car over it) and I reciprocated with lemonade and brownies. As before with the zucchini bread, the empty plate and pitcher were at my door within about 2 minutes. Anyway, we had brownies and wintergreen ice cream for dessert.

Gifts: we have two sets of new neighbors, next door and across the street. I brought each of them a few of jars of jam and pickles. I hope they feel welcome. Moving to a new place can be pretty overwhelming!

Cornichons and Gherkins

This morning, I made Sweet Gherkins using the recipe on page 306 of Preserving Summer's Bounty. It called for honey, which might just be the first time I've ever canned anything with honey in it. Basically, after soaking the little cucumbers overnight in ice water, I cooked them in a mixture of cider vinegar, turmeric, pickling spices, cinnamon and celery seeds. To this mixture, 2 cups of honey are added. That's a lot of honey. I used up the local honey I'd bought for the bees and then added in some more *gasp* store-bought organic honey. The recipe says it makes 10-11 pints, but I only got 4 and a half, so I don't know what's going on there.

Then, after the other cucumbers had sat in salt for a day, they were ready to become cornichons. This recipe comes from page 90 of The Joy of Pickling. These cornichons are pickled but not canned. After rinsing and drying the cucumbers, they are packed into a quart jar with 4 shallots, 2 dried chilies, 1 bay leaf, 10 peppercorns, and 2 sprigs of fresh tarragon. Then the jar is filled with white wine vinegar. I finished my bottle of white wine vinegar so had to top off the jar with some tarragon vinegar instead. Now it sits on the shelf for a month before eating them. With paté.

Little Tiny

We went down to visit my parents today, so we stopped by the farm near their place which has pickling cukes and peaches in their respective seasons. I was lucky enough to snag the last peck of teeny tiny cucumbers, the ones that are 1-2 inches long, for canning. I hadn't been planning on doing this today, so I wasn't entirely prepared, but I had enough to get started.

I have set aside 1.25 pounds of the very smallest (yes, I sorted the whole peck) to make cornichons. They are currently salted and resting for a day. They will be ready to work with around 5 pm tomorrow. I had a few cucumbers from the farm share and I added the largest of this new bag of cukes to make a half-batch of bread and butter pickles; these were sliced along with one onion and 1.5 heads of spring garlic and mixed with salt and ice and sat for 2.5 hours while we had dinner. 2 quarts were put into a jar with garlic, dill seed, a chili pepper, and brine and they will ferment into half-sours. There is also a batch of "Favorite Dill Pickles" (see below) and the rest will be made into gherkins; which are currently sitting with ice water in the fridge. Tomorrow I'll finish those up.

Before dinner, I made the batch of dill pickles - using the recipe on page 133 of The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving. These have garlic, dill seeds, mustard seeds, and a little sugar in addition to the vinegar-water-salt brine. The recipe made 6 pints, not 4, as I left the cukes whole. I had to make an extra half-batch of the brine in order to fill the jars. Two jars have been set aside for the fair, as long as they taste good when we open them up.

After dinner, I finished the bread and butter pickles: using the recipe on page 95 in The Joy of Pickling, but cut in half, the only other change was using the spring garlic. I hope it isn't too overwhelming to have the garlic flavor but I thought it'd be nice. Half a batch makes 4 pints.

That should be plenty of cucumber pickles for this season!