Crabapples at Work

At my new(ish) job, I get a lunch break. It's still a novelty. I've taken to going for walks. The loop around the building and the parking lot takes about 15 minutes so it's just enough to feel refreshed. The other day, while walking, I discovered a couple of crabapple trees. After work, I went back and picked all the crabapples that looked reasonably okay. They're not as large as the ones I picked years ago which were at an apartment complex and better cared for but they're still crabapples and they will still make jelly.

Today I took the 7 cups of crabapple juice I extracted and made jelly. I haven't bought pectin in forever and I don't have any currently so I did this the old fashioned way, using the natural pectin in the apples to make the jelly. It seems to have worked. I ended up with eight jars of jelly. For six of them, I placed into each jar a star anise pod, half a cinnamon stick, one clove, two peppercorns, and a dried cayenne pepper. 

In case I do enter them in the fair, here's the recipe:

7 cups crabapple juice

7 cups sugar

1.5 T lemon juice

Boiled until 220˚F

There aren't too many other forage-able things at work that I've identified otherwise, so this may be the only work related project for a while. 

Tasting Demo

My husband's coworkers, after hearing him rave about my canned goods, asked for a tasting. Today I brought 8 different things to sample, which we set up at a table during lunchtime. This way, people could just wander over. I brought:

Preserved garlic which was, by far, everyone's favorite.
Sweet Fiddlehead pickles. I'd brought 2 jars, we finished 1 and didn't open the second. Popular.
Bread and butter pickles, which also got some rave reviews.
Zydeco beans, nice and spicy.
Salsa verde, not as popular. I suspect that if I'd had the right chips to go with it the jar would be finished.
Crabapple jelly; people who like apple jellies liked this a lot.
Elderberry jam which was my husband's favorite, I think.
Strawberry Lemon Marmalade; this one surprised me at how much the lemon flavor stood out when compared to when I first made it. It was very popular.

It's nice to get some feedback from people who don't often get to eat the foods I prepare.

It's Late February, So I Must Have Been....

Looking toward Breckenridge from Copper

...skiing!  This, plus the final push at work, and taking a class in Boulder, CO, explains why I have done almost nothing of note in the kitchen in the last month.

Well, that's not entirely true.  We brought 1 jar of salsa and 2 jars of jam with us on the trip, and brought home 3 empty jars.  We had our usual go to meals, with a few variations.  Since there were a few more people this time, I started with roasting 2 chickens.  One chicken was dinner the first night with mashed potatoes and green beans, and the meat from the second chicken was the protein for the burritos another night.  The bones all went into making soup, which was lunch for several days.  We had BLT night, and pasta-with-Rick's-famous-lamb-sauce night, and went out for dinner one night.  At that point, I left the crew and headed to Boulder for my class, and they were on their own with instructions to eat up whatever was left.  They did pretty well, actually, only bringing back a little bit of food to my sister's place.  My sister had been kind enough to buy all the groceries before we got there, which saved us a HUGE amount of time and effort.  I think it was, quite possibly, more groceries than she'd ever bought at one time ever in her life!

While in Boulder, I recertified as a Wilderness First Responder.  It was an adventure!  I was one of the three people who got to be doused in cold water and shoved out into the snow so the rest of the class could rescue someone with hypothermia.  To be fair, I did kinda volunteer.  It was fun, in a shivery sort of way.

I got home last night, and today involved a lot of quality time with the laundry machine and some time spent chipping away at the ice that covered half our driveway.  I did make 2 loaves of bread, and I have a pork roast in the oven.  I think we might use the last of the spiced crabapples on the roast.  And preserved garlic.  I can't wait for dinner!

Lamb Soup and Other Projects

This morning, after running out to the muffin store to get breakfast, I heated up the rest of the mixed foraged fruit juice, added 2 cups of sugar, and canned 3 quarts of juice.  Then we went outside to enjoy the beautiful day before coming back and doing more things around the house.

My husband spent the day preparing the walls of our 9 year old's room for painting.  It was a lot of work and they only got through part of the ceiling before they ran out of that paint and had to call it a day.  While they did that, I made a batch of chicken stock using the bones of a rotisserie chicken we had this week and canned 5 pints.

While the stock was in the canner, I brought out the Icelandic Lamb Soup I'd made yesterday and skimmed off all the fat.  Then I set it on the stove to warm up slowly and went outside to do some yard work.  You know that little strip of earth between the road and the sidewalk?  I've been trying for 11 years to plant things that grow.  Bulbs of various kinds, euonymus, daylilies, hostas.  Nothing really works out.  I have finally ceded control of that strip to the crabgrass that really wants to grow there.  So I moved the daylilies to other parts of my garden and cleaned it all up.  This way, I can mow it as often as needed and not have to dodge all the other plants.

After I finished up for the day, I went back inside and canned 2 quarts and 5 pints of the lamb soup.  This was happening around the time that my husband was running out of paint, so it seemed like a good time for everyone to stop and have dinner.  We had big bowls of soup with bread, sprinkled with some mushroom-infused Icelandic sea salt to round out the flavor.  

Forage-juice!

OK, now I'm just being silly.

Even so, every Wednesday I walk around the stables and look for foragable things.  Like autumn olives, and grapes.  Yesterday I discovered that the crabapple tree had actual crabapples, not the stunted little rocks it usually has.  I tasted one and it was pretty good even though it was a little sour.  I hit upon a plan (uh oh, we know how these things go....).

I combined the autumn olives (1 cup), wild grapes (1 quart) and crabapples (1 quart) in a pot and covered them with 5 cups of water.  This was simmered and crushed and strained through a jelly bag last night.  I got a little over 4 cups of pink, syrupy juice.  This morning I added 1.5 cups of sugar and another pint of water and made juice for canning.  Using the instructions for grape juice, I heated the juice to 190 degrees for 5 minutes and then put it into pint jars (3) and now will process for 15 minutes.  I'm trying to come up with a good name for it.  "Crabby Autumn Grape Juice" is so far the best contender.

A Whole Lot of Cooking Going On

Sometimes I take on too many things.  ("No!" you say, incredulously.  Or is that sarcastically?)

We had lunch at my friend's house and I brought a stepstool so we could get more of those crabapples.  We specifically picked those which had no holes, rotten spots, or anything that looked remotely like a bug had been at it.  I was canning these ones whole.  We picked a little over 4 pounds.  I used the Spiced Crabapple recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and made 2 quarts and 2 pints.  I will give a quart to my friend and I expect to give away 2 more of the jars.  It has cinnamon, allspice, and clove in it.  They smell lovely!

If that had been the only canning/cooking project for the day it would have been plenty.  But I had a few other things in the works.  I had set up a double batch of stroganoff in the slow cooker this morning.  But, since the slow cooker isn't big enough for 2 batches, I put the meat, onions and half the liquid in and cooked it all day and when we got back at 5 pm I put it in a pot with the mushrooms and the rest of the liquid and let it simmer.

Then I made chocolate zucchini bread - finally tamed the last of the monster zucchinis.  It makes 2 loaves.  I probably could have left them in the oven a little longer - they are soft on the bottom.  That's OK.  It's amazing.  The 6 year old gobbled up a slice.  Shhh!  Don't say anything!

THEN I made the spiced crabapples.  I got distracted doing laundry and they overcooked a little so some of the apples burst.  But overall most of them are still apple-shaped.  While they were processing I got the pressure canner ready and heated up 2 more quart jars.  After the pot was cleaned I cooked the noodles for the stroganoff.  Then when I had room on the stove for the pressure canner I started warming that up and filled the 2 quart jars with stroganoff (take it out before you put the sour cream in) and got them going in the pressure canner.  They're now going strong.

We had dinner, we had the zucchini bread, and now I'm going to go play Blokus with the family.

Whew!

Herbal Experiment

After a long night at work and a 4-hour nap I felt refreshed enough to tackle that second batch of crabapple jelly.  Same recipe from the Certo package as yesterday, but today I put large sprigs of purple basil into 2 of the half-pint jars.  I have no idea if that will work, but I remember something about lavender and strawberries in the past and thought it might be interesting.  The purple basil came from the farm share.  Usually when there's basil I give it to Stephanie as I'm not too into pesto and I don't really have a whole lot of uses for fresh basil.  But the purple basil was pretty and I thought I might find a use for a little bit.  I split that bunch with her.  And voila, I have a use for it!  Purple basil looks really nice in the bubble-gum-pink jelly.  Will let you know how it tastes when we open it.

The crabapple jelly itself is really wonderful.  Just ask my 9 year old who scraped the pot clean!

Nostalgia

Hey, Mom, does this look familiar?

When I was a kid we had what I always thought were apple trees in our backyard.  My grandmother visited in the late summer/fall and insisted that they were really large crabapples.  To this day I don't know which they were, but once she proclaimed them crabapples, that was it.  Then she made crabapple jelly.  She harvested countless crabapples, made juice and then jelly.  We had jars of jelly all over the house.  We used washed out condiment jars sealed with paraffin when we ran out of canning jars.  We were finding them years later, hidden in the storage room.  I think my parents may have found some when they moved out.

Today my friend, the same one who brought me the zucchini, brought me crabapples.  I've seen the trees.  They are the healthiest looking crabapple trees I've seen in a long time!  And not on the side of a road, either.  They are next to a little pond behind her apartment building.  It's very nice there.  I took those crabapples and trimmed them and boiled them to make juice.  I ended up with a very syrupy 6 cups of juice which I diluted with water almost in half to make less syrupy.  It was the perfect consistency at that point.  I then made one batch using the Certo recipe (5 cups juice, 7.5 cups sugar, 1 package Certo), which was just shy of 9 cups.  I offered my friend some.  She said, "You know, I don't really eat jams or jellies."  I convinced her to take a jar anyway.

The 9 year old had a glass of juice sweetened with just a little sugar and I have enough left for another batch of jelly.  Which I might make tomorrow.  I have to go to work tonight.  But I spent the day with fond memories of my grandmother.  And that's a pretty cool gift from a simple little fruit.