Elderberries

It's been four years since I made elderberry jelly. For some reason, I am always busy while they are in season and their season is relatively short. This year, I managed to catch them between travel and work, and so got enough berries to make a batch of jelly. Just like before, 5 cups of elderberry juice, 1/3 cup lemon juice, 6-1/2 cups sugar and 1 box of powdered pectin. If I decide to enter things in the fair this year which, so far, is going ahead as scheduled, I will enter this.

Gummies

While we were all sick, it was suggested we take elderberry as a supplement - supposedly it has anti-flu properties. They taste great but they're rather expensive. I figured I had elderberry syrup around and it might be fun to make my own. So I bought some silicone molds and gelatin and played around.

The first batch was with unsweetened rose hip juice which I had in the freezer. Let's just say, it needs to be sweetened with more than a heaping tablespoon of honey. They set nicely but taste pretty bland.

Today's batch was with the elderberry syrup. One cup of syrup plus another 1/4 of water and 2-3 packets of unflavored gelatin. Once they're in the molds they go into the fridge for 2 hours or so to set. They set well but were tacky so I coated them in sugar to make them less likely to stick to the plate or our hands or the counter. These taste really good, too! I don't have any more elderberry syrup but I have elderflower and cherry, maybe I can play around some more.

Elderberry Jelly

A month or so ago, I noticed a lot of elderberry flowers on a road nearby. They were on the edge of a marsh, a perfect place for elderberries to grow and grow well. I made a mental note to check them again toward the end of the summer. Usually around here they ripen in late August or early September. Not this year! I happened to be driving by yesterday morning after taking the youngerchild to camp and noticed lots of dark purple berries. Yesterday afternoon I went back and picked a whole bunch.

After I got home, I washed them, got them off the stems, and juiced them. I got a little over 5 cups of juice so I let that sit in the fridge overnight for the solids to settle. This morning, after a run to the hardware store for more jars, I made a batch of jelly. I used all the juice I had and, since it was more than the standard recipe (4 cups) I tweaked:

5+ cups elderberry juice

1/3 cup lemon juice

1 package powdered pectin

6 1/2 cups sugar

The yield here is 9 cups plus a little bit. As soon as they come out of the canner, I'm going to pick some more peaches.

And, since this jelly won in it's class last year in the fair, I think I won't enter it this year.

Success!

It's rainy and cold today, which is just the day to go to the fair if you don't like the crowds. Which is exactly how we like it! We generally avoid the midway and the rides so the rain doesn't bother us.

Salsa Verde

Part of the collection of strawberry jams

Elderberry Jelly

Strawberry Jam

First off, the canning results: First place for salsa (salsa verde), sweet relish (zucchini relish), and "other" jelly (elderberry). Second place for the collection of 3 jams (variations on strawberry), apricot jam, and "other" pickled vegetables (carrots).  Third place for strawberry jam and raspberry jam. The dill pickles and the bread and butter pickles didn't place. The judges did something different this year. There were no Honorable Mentions, and if they didn't think a category didn't have a first place entrant they just didn't fill it. Some categories only had a third place awarded. Many categories had multiple winners in each place. It was unusual; I've not seen anything like it before.

Apricot Jam

Honey Lemon Almond Coffee Cake

Next, to the bee house for the baking with honey competition! I'm quite pleased to report that the Honey Lemon Almond cake won the coffee cake class and the Honey Whole Wheat Bread placed second in the whole grain yeast bread class. And I got some suggestions for a class to take this winter that isn't far from home and covers top bar hives.

Dilled Carrots

For the rest of the day we wandered around, ate fair food, watched emus race and female lumberjacks chop up logs. We fell in love with the rabbits, as always, and watched a chick hatch. And we rode an elephant. It was an odd collection of things.

Zucchini Relish

Raspberry Jam

Elderberry Season

One of the few plants that did well this year were elderberries. In the spring the large puffy white flower heads were visible everywhere I looked. I tried to remember where I saw them so I could find the berries at this time of year. My usual spot didn't look so good today, perhaps due to having done so well last year, so I went to a different spot and got a good amount of berries.

The most tedious part of foraging has to be the cleaning and prepping of the food and elderberries are tops in tedium. It took me probably 90 minutes to get all the berries off the stems. After that, though, extracting the juice and making a batch of jelly took no time at all.

For today's jelly: 4 cups elderberry juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 5 1/2 cups sugar and one package of powdered pectin. This makes almost exactly 7 cups of jelly.

Now I have a dilemma: I have entered the "other jelly" class in the fair, and I have both elderberry and rose hip jellies. I think tonight there will be a taste test to determine which one I should enter (I can only enter once per class).

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.

Foraging When I Can

Yesterday was a pretty good weather day - 80's, a breeze, not too humid. Today we have thunderstorms. We were supposed to go camping this weekend but it's looking like that is a no go as this rain is supposed to continue all weekend. As our friends with whom we camp said, a passing thunderstorm is one thing but who wants to put up a tent in the rain?

Anyway, that same little voice that nagged me about the blueberries was after me about elderberries, too. The flowers had been so prevalent that there had to be tons of berries, the voice reasoned. And the voice was right. Yesterday I went back to my favorite elderberry shrub and the berries were ripe, plentiful and huge. I picked a whole bunch and came home and got them set up to extract the juice. I got about a quart of juice out of them. As I still have elderberry syrup and 1 jar of jam (of which I'm not fond because of the seeds) I decided jelly was the way to go.

This morning I mixed the 4 cups of juice with a little over 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 5-1/2 cups of sugar and 1 package of powdered pectin and came out with 7 cups of elderberry jelly. It still has that slightly earthy taste which I like.

Also this morning, I am pressure canning beans. I had about 4 quarts of string beans from the farm share and, as I already had dilly beans, I thought maybe pressure canning them might work. I don't really do a lot of vegetable canning this way, probably because I have an aversion to canned vegetables after eating a lot of elementary school lunches. Something about the metallic taste/smell, I think. Anyway, maybe glass jars are better? We'll see. Three quarts of beans, cold packed, are currently in the canner.

Another thing I did yesterday was put a jar of sugar syrup (3 cups sugar, 3 cups water) into the hive in my hacked together feeder. I used a plastic take-out tray and some bamboo skewers, cut to fit, to make a base for the jar of syrup. Using a nail I poked tiny holes in the lid for the bees to sip from. The base holds the jar up so the bees can get underneath it to drink. I went to check on them at the end of the day and they'd taken about 1/4 cup, maybe more, of the syrup already. This way I can make more syrup and just swap out the jars and hopefully a little less often than what I was doing in the beginning. There is a product called Honey B Healthy that contains essential oils for the bees, I purchased the ingredients online and will start making some when they arrive. Apparently one adds about a teaspoon of this mix to each quart of syrup and it's good for them. 

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.  

Autumn Mushrooms and Other Things

Yesterday while I was at the stables I found 2 good sized Shaggy Mane mushrooms that seemed early enough in their lifespan that I could pick them and use them today.  One of them turned inky overnight but the other was just fine.  I made an omelet with that one mushroom, some onion, and a little too much cheese.  Yum!

Also last night I made a batch of yogurt with a new container of starter.  It came out perfect.  The last batch I'd made was too liquidy so it was used up in smoothies, which the 9 year old really enjoyed.  I'm not sure why when I save some of my yogurt and start a new batch with it I have more trouble than when I use a new container every time.  I wish I could figure it out - maybe I wait too long between batches?

Omelet, also with foraged plum jelly on the toast.

At the stables yesterday I noted that all the autumn olives, which I'd been gathering for a while, had vanished.  I guess there was a point at which they were exactly right and the birds came and ate them.  All of them.  So I took what I had already frozen, which was a quart, and cooked them with the other foraged berries I'd been saving, and made juice this morning:  grapes, elderberries, a few blackberries and a few crabapples.  The juice will sit overnight and tomorrow I'll add sugar and can it.

Forageberry Crisp

Today we returned from our annual camping trip and, this time, I was armed with a very handy book!  It was a gift from Lisa, and I used it to identify some berries I didn't really recognize.  When we arrived and found our campsite was full of blackberries, I hit upon an idea.  I would collect every type of edible berry I could find and make a crisp or cobbler out of them when we got home.

Mostly I found blackberries.  Wild, small, tart blackberries.  I also found similar berries on a ground cover bramble - a different type of blackberry, it seems.  And I found Juneberries, blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries, partridge berries, and a single teaberry.  (It's a little early in the season for the teaberries (aka wintergreen), after all.)  I also ate a couple of bunchberries but, like the partridge berries, they were tasteless so I decided to leave them out of the final baking.

Once I got everything home I washed and sorted and got rid of any that had gotten squishy over the weekend.  Then I put them in a little 7 x 4 pyrex dish and made a wee little crisp.  It was pretty seedy but tasty!
 

Foraged in Stages

As I think I've previously mentioned, this has been an excellent year for berries in our area.  Everywhere I go, I find some sort of berry or other.  So far it's been blueberries, elderberries, and blackberries, with a few raspberries thrown in for good measure.  It is much more fun to go on a walk when one can stop and eat a few berries!

However I have also wanted to make blackberry jam.  But I never get enough at one place to make that possible.  So I have been going on lots of walks, carrying ziploc bags or little berry baskets, and getting a few here, a few there.  I have lots of blackberry areas staked out, and would give more berries time to ripen and go back.  It's paid off; I accumulated and froze 2 quarts of berries and, yesterday, got about 1 cup more.  Time to make jam.

I pulled out the food mill this morning and ran everything through.  The yield was 5 cups of seedless blackberry puree, just enough for a batch of jam with the powdered pectin.  Somehow it made 9 cups of jam, which was a surprise, as the recipe indicated I'd only get 7.  Whatever!  The 8 year old, who helped get a lot of the berries, got to lick the pot for breakfast.  How great is that?

The 8 year old and I also got 3 pounds of elderberries while we were out yesterday, from that same wonderful shrub I'd found before.  More were ripe this time, so it was easier.  Yesterday I smushed them with an immersion blender and ran them through a jelly bag, getting 1 quart of juice.  Today I mixed that quart with 4 cups of sugar and made syrup.  I ended up with exactly 3 pints, divvied up into 12-ounce and 8-ounce jars.  I used Hank Shaw's recipe - he has terrific recipes for foraged foods.  (As an aside, I'm hoping to go to his book tour stop in our area this fall.)

Two foraged canning projects in one day!  Crazy!

Now I See Them Everywhere

Last year, I finally discovered what elderberries look like.  It took a while to be sure I had correctly identified them.  I had just a few and made a single jar of jam.

This year, everywhere I look I find elderberry bushes.  I'd found some at the stables, but surrounded by thorny rosebushes.  There's one at the park down the road.  None of those berries were ripe yet, so I decided to stop by a few other parks with streams I knew of.  I found some in a nearby town today along with a bunch of blackberries.  I picked a few, as there weren't a lot of ripe panicles, and thought I'd come back in a few days or so to check again.  I left the park.  I walked across the street, to where the stream came back out and alongside an access road to yet another park.  It was there I found the motherlode of elderberries!  These ones were huge (in comparison, let's face it, they're still only about a quarter of an inch across), and the panicles were laden with berries.  Much more than any I'd ever seen. I picked a whole lot, and got them home to discover I had about 6.5 cups (some weren't too ripe, I saved those for the photo).  I wanted 8 cups to make a batch of jam, so I went back out to yet another conservation land and, sure enough, found some more.  Enough to make 8 cups.

To make the jam, I boiled the berries with 3/4 cup water for a few minutes then crushed them with a masher.  I should have taken the seeds out at this point, but didn't.  Now I know.  Next year, no seeds!  Anyhow, to this I added a package of powdered pectin and 7 cups of sugar and now have 10 jars of elderberry jam, plus more in the fridge.  I've had a few spoonfuls, just to make sure I was correct in my identification, before I feed it to anyone else.

If I feel inspired to pick any more berries, I might make elderberry syrup.

Tea Party

For many years, our birthday present for my mother was to go out for high tea.  There was a great little place in RI that served a beautiful tea and they were willing to have children as young as 4 as long as they were well behaved.  It became a tradition.  But, as is the case for all things, the place changed and the magic was gone.  We tried to find a new place and failed.  Instead, we decided to recreate the experience ourselves.

The scones (not pictured) are from this recipe for currant scones.  We used my one precious jar of elderberry jam and also some strawberry jam for those who might think the elderberry jam is too seedy.  And clotted cream.  Mmm, that clotted cream is awesome.  Happy belated birthday, Mom.

Cucumber, ham salad, egg salad and smoked salmon sandwiches.

Elderberries! (I think...)

We just got back from our annual camping trip.  In opting for Labor Day weekend, we ended up camping much later than usual (but got a bonus day out of it!) and, with the weather being what it's been, the foraging was all wonky.

Gone were the blackberries which would have likely been abundant 3-4 weeks ago.  Long gone were the blueberries.  However, there was apple picking and a surprise find of elderberries.

I think they are elderberries.  I looked it up on my phone, confirmed from several different sources that I had elderberries and not water hemlock berries or devil's walking stick berries.  Neither of which is good to eat, but my husband felt that "Devil's Walking Stick Jam" was a great name for a jam.  Sigh.  I even crushed a berry to determine how many seeds were in it.  Everything checked out, so I picked every ripe elderberry I could find.  Don't worry, I left many unripe ones for the animals to eat or for the seeds to propagate or whatever normally happens to elderberries.

Even with all that, I came home with exactly one cup of berries.  The recipes all call for 8 cups, or 3 pounds, or some other crazy amount which was simply unattainable given the shrubs I found.  I pared down the old fashioned (pectin-free) recipe for 1 cup and made exactly one 8-ounce jar of jam.  Which I tasted, being the official taste tester of all things foraged.  It's a complex flavor, and I'm bound to like it because I'm just plain excited that I found something I wasn't expecting simply because I was open to the experience.

I've also made 2 batches of applesauce, which made 5 quarts, and I still have a lot of apples to work through.  I used entirely macintoshes for these batches but the first batch was slightly *ahem* caramelized, which made it a nice color.  The second batch got some cinnamon because it was a really strange green color.

While I have the canner out I'll can the rest of the sauerkraut that finished fermenting last week.  It's been in the fridge; we took some with us on the trip and it went so amazingly well with the Bauernwurst and the Nuremburgwurst we brought.

On the agenda this week:  dilled carrots from all the farm share carrots, an apple pie, maybe more applesauce, and to figure out something to do with all the tomatillos in the farm share.