Mixed Bread and Butter Pickles

This week we have the farm share to ourselves, and there were almost enough cucumbers to make a half-batch of bread and butter pickles. But not quite. So I added one small, cucumber sized zucchini and that was perfect. With the onion and Hungarian hot wax peppers I also got at the farm today, I was able to make four half-pint jars of bread and butter pickles. Which is good, as I think we ran out about a month ago.

Now I Have a Deadline

I finally checked out the exhibitors' guide for the Topsfield Fair and I have until September 7 to enter. I think I will enter the dill pickles and elderberry jelly I have already made, plus today's Salsa Verde and Bread and Butter pickles. The farm share was full of pickling cukes, onions and tomatillos today and I was able to make a batch of the salsa and 4 pints of Bread and Butter pickles.

Given the time constraints I have over the next few weeks, this may be it for my entries. I don't think I'm going to try to bake for the fair this year, either. I want to see how this year goes. 

No Rain

We're in a bit of a drought at the moment, but that's not the topic of today's post. We were supposed to go for a socially distant walk/hike/picnic with friends today, so we got food together and were all set when, right before we were to leave, the sky got really dark. The forecast said it was likely that there would be thunderstorms so we rescheduled and stayed put, only to have it not rain at all. Hopefully the forecast for tomorrow is still better because we don't really have another option.

I ended up using that time to make another batch of Bread and Butter Pickles, with cucumbers from the farm share and my garden, along with an onion and a Hungarian hot wax pepper. From about 1.5 pounds of cucumbers I ended up with 2.5 pints of pickles. Yes, this is a very small batch; I'd been waiting for more cukes by now but both the farm and my garden have stopped producing in any sort of quantity. I'm hoping when it cools down again the plants I have at home will perk up. 

Spaghetti Sauce

For a while now I've been meaning to make spaghetti sauce. Since I've been on a roll with plum tomatoes from the farm share, I thought this week I could try this recipe for spaghetti sauce and make a few jars. Yesterday I picked about 13 pounds of plum tomatoes and today, while waiting to get my chimney swept, I started a half batch. It took roughly four hours to cook to the right consistency and then a while to get it all canned (mainly because I had to take the youngerchild back to school for a club meeting which is a 40 minute round-trip so I had to wait until I got back to actually boil the water in the canner).

Ultimately I ended up with a little more than four quarts of sauce. I quite like it, I do think the soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce add depth and a little punch to the flavor. Plus, I used a bunch of onions and peppers from the share so that helped make a dent in the huge piles of vegetables I've accumulated over the past few weeks.

The other thing I did today was make a compound butter with duck fat. To properly experience this glorious creation we made corn bread for dinner and it was, indeed, lovely.

All Day Affair

Both the projects I made for tonight's dinner took most of a day or more.

First, I made baguettes. To be fair, I made them for a little party yesterday, but the recipe made three baguettes so I had one left for dinner tonight. I used a recipe my friend had developed (he has some of Legion and so adapted a couple of recipes to use the starter instead of making a new poolish from scratch each time):

16 oz bread flour

6 oz starter

1 tsp salt

pinch of instant yeast

9+ oz water

Put the flour in the mixer, make a well in the center for the starter. Sprinkle the yeast and salt around the edge of the bowl (not touching the starter). Add the water and mix. Knead in the mixer for about 15 minutes until the dough is wrapped around the bread hook and is elastic and smooth. Turn out and quickly shape into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover. Then you can take as little as 6 hours, doing a fold of the dough hourly (pull up the dough from the sides and form a pouch like a dumpling) or a whole day or more by putting the dough in the fridge and doing the folds less frequently. I think I ended up doing 8 folds over an entire 29 hours (I was working in between all these steps). Then yesterday I got up at 4 am to shape and proof the loaves in a couche. At 6 am the loaves were in the oven (spritz with water and score with a lam first), 420˚F, boiling water tray for the first 10 minutes and then 15-20 minutes without the boiling water. (Then I went to work.) The general feedback was that the bread needed more salt but that the crust was firm and the inside was soft and full of big holes, which is what I was trying to achieve.

Then today I worked on this recipe for "Sunday Sauce." I'm not really sure how it's supposed to taste, but it smelled like one of the Italian restaurants we like, so I guess I did OK. I got it all on the stove and simmering by noon and it simmered all afternoon until about 6 pm. Maybe that was too long, but it seemed fine. We have a LOT of sauce and meatballs left over.

The other thing I made today was a sweet pepper relish, using the recipe in "The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving," page 164. Since I plan to enter this in the fair, I need to remember that I used 9 long sweet peppers, some dark green and some light, 2 very large onions, and 5 Hungarian hot wax peppers. Those were all from the farm share, as last week's distribution was rather pepper-heavy. There aren't really any cucumbers anymore. My last batch of pickles, the sweet icicle ones, are almost done. I have one more day in which I drain the syrup, boil it and put it back over the cucumbers. I'm not really sold on this one, I have to say. It reminds me of watermelon rind pickles which, while fun to make, were too cloyingly sweet for me.

Pickles and More Pickles

The farm share is still offering up unlimited pickling cucumbers and now, also, unlimited zucchini (there's a surprise). I decided on the spot to make another batch of those dill pickles I made last week and also a batch of bread and butter pickles but with zucchini instead of cucumbers.

Fifteen pickling cukes made five pints of dill pickles so, for future reference, about three cucumbers per wide mouth pint jar.

I brought home about three pounds of zucchini so used one large onion and halved the recipe for "Old Fashioned Bread-and-Butters" in The Joy of Pickling. This made exactly four pints, as expected, but one pint was split into two half-pint jars for the fair. I will enter the dill pickles in to the fair as well. 

Bread and Bread and Butter Pickles

We went down to Washington, DC, for a few days. The elderchild was there for camp so we brought the youngerchild and spent a few days showing them around. Among all the monuments and museums, the highlight was seeing the space shuttle Discovery on display in Virginia as part of the National Air and Space Museum. Worth the trip. We've now seen two of the four shuttles on display around the country. There are so many crazy aircraft there: military, commercial, and general enthusiast alike, some even made from kits. It's amazing some of those things actually flew.

Honorable mention goes to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. It's beautifully done; the bulk of the top floor exhibit compares and contrasts different Nations' beliefs with regard to the cardinal directions and what they represent. It's too much to go into here but it's another museum that probably doesn't get as many visitors as, say, the Museum of Natural History, but should.

Anyway, we got back at 3 pm today and my husband and I dashed out to pick up the farm share. Apparently there is still a cucumber bonanza happening and there were unlimited cucumbers again. I took a bunch of pickling cukes, enough this time to make a batch of spicy bread and butter pickles. The recipe:

3 pounds pickling cukes

2 white onions (about 3/4 pound)

3 Hungarian Hot Wax peppers

1/4 cup Kosher salt

2 1/4 cups cider vinegar

1 1/2 cups sugar

3/4 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp celery seed

1 tsp mustard seed

The cucumbers, onions and peppers were thinly sliced and tossed with the salt. These were covered with ice cubes and set aside for 3 hours. After that, the rest of the ingredients were boiled, the drained vegetables were added, and brought to a boil. They were processed for 10 minutes and rested for 3 before I brought them out. I'm hoping to take some to the fair. The total yield was 4.5 pints.

Also tonight I brought out Legion for the first time in a while. I'd meant to feed it before we went to DC but time got away from me. Legion was not happy. After removing the top layer that had oversoured, I took out what I needed for bread and am starting the slow process of revitalizing it. I hope it has enough life in it to ferment the dough I made this evening, the culture is currently in a warm place and is VERY slowly bubbling, so I know something still lives in there. It may mean that the bread will have to ferment for longer, I'll check it in the morning and see.

Accidental General Gao's

When I set out to make venison meatballs today, I did not intend to make them sweet. I looked up a recipe online and started to follow it, only to realize I didn't have all the correct ingredients. So I improvised, but what we ended up with was a surprise.

Here are the meatballs:

1.5 pounds ground venison

1/2 cup bulgur wheat

salt and pepper

dried basil (about 1 tsp)

dried parsley (about 2 tsp)

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 sweet onion, minced

dash of nutmeg

1 egg

These were mixed and then allowed to rest for a bit so the bulgur wheat could moisten. Later I rolled this mixture into meatballs, it made 17. I baked them in the oven at 350˚F for 30 minutes and then added them to the sauce to simmer.

Here's the sauce, and considering I hardly ever have tomato jam it's unlikely I'll ever make it exactly this way again:

1/2 sweet onion, diced

3 ribs celery, diced

olive oil

4 oz. tomato jam

4 oz. port

8 oz. tomato sauce

salt and pepper

dried parsley (about 1 T.)

Sauté the onion and celery in the oil. Add the jam and heat until the onions are soft. Pour in the port and then the tomato sauce and let it boil down for about 10 minutes. Add the parsley, salt and pepper. Simmer on low until you add the meatballs and then continue to simmer for about an hour. 

The sauce ended up very sweet, with a taste similar to General Gao's chicken. The meatballs lost their gaminess in the process of being cooked for so long. We served them over egg noodles and they were excellent. I suppose that in the future I could just go all the way down that road and toss some sesame seeds on them.

Beet Tart

Tonight we had friends over for dinner and I made use of all the golden beets I'd gotten from our farm share. First I roasted the beets until soft, slipped off the skins, and sliced them. For this I used a little less than a pound of beets. Two onions were sliced and caramelized. Then I made a pie crust with leaf lard and flour.

To assemble, I rolled out the crust and placed it on parchment. Next came the onions, and then the sliced beets. Lastly, I crumbled honeyed goat cheese over the vegetables and seasoned with pepper and tarragon. Then I folded the crust over to make a rustic tart, brushed the crust with milk, and baked at 375˚F for about 35 minutes until golden brown.

It was delicious!

BACON.

Today I converted 4 pounds of bacon into about 7 cups of bacon jam. I used this recipe from Martha Stewart but, since I was scaling up, made a few changes:

1. Instead of just coffee, I used half coffee, half bourbon.
2. The vinegar was about 1/3 sherry vinegar and the rest was cider vinegar.
3. I used a mixture of yellow and red onions.

I decided not to pressure can these, partly because I only had jars of varying sizes and so there is a lack of consistency. They will be stored in the fridge and freezer instead; eight jars in all.

Excavating

Now is the time to dig out the fridge. And it's a good day for it as there is a sidewalk repair going on across the street and it's hard to get in and out of the driveway. Because of the excavator.

With all the accumulated farm share veggies I made a triple batch of eggplant caponata (9 jars) and a full batch of hot pepper sauce (also 9 jars). I had to run to the store to get more jars.

Also today, I baked the bread and cake with honey that I plan to enter in the fair. I have to bring those up tomorrow to Topsfield. I was hoping to do that tonight but my husband and I are going to a lecture downtown and so I made time to drive up there tomorrow. The bread is the same whole wheat bread recipe I've been using with Legion and the cake is the honey lemon almond pound cake I came up with when I was in school. I'll top that with a lemon ganache and black walnuts. Tomorrow morning. Early. I don't think I'll have time to do that tonight. There was a bit of a crisis with the bread, though. The parchment paper I bought recently is *ahem* not of the best quality and STUCK to the bread. What a disaster! When I discovered the problem, the other loaf was in the oven so halfway through the baking process I had to get it off the bad parchment and onto another baking sheet lined with better parchment. This seems to have worked and I have one loaf without any stuck-on parchment to enter. I did go back to Amazon and write a truthful review of the parchment paper. I will never buy that again!

Kicked into Higher Gear

This week the farm was bountiful and I came back with more tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and hot peppers than previous weeks. In addition, there was even more zucchini! I have way, way too much zucchini. There will be chocolate zucchini bread again in our future. And maybe even a birthday cake made with the same recipe. But not today; today was for pickles, caponata and salsa!

First I made three 8-ounce jars of dill pickles - two of them are for the fair, with the cucumbers cut into spears. The other jar consisted of slices from the pieces that were cut off to make the spears fit in the jars. That one is for us! This batch used the same "Favorite Dill Pickles" recipe from the Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving.

Next I made a double batch of eggplant caponata from Roxanne's recipe printed in Blue Ribbon Canning. (This is the book for which she and her sister and I contributed recipes and even have photos and bios of us.) This made a total of five and a half pints.

This evening I used up the rest of the tomatoes, three cippolini onions, two green peppers, and three jalapeños to make salsa. The vegetables were roasted first and then puréed with a immersion blender and mixed with vinegar, salt and sugar. This made exactly two pints.

Now I do have more room in the fridge. Except for the zucchini. They are still taking up a lot of space. 

Root Veggies

There is a drought going on here in Massachusetts and it's affected the farm. They're actually doing fairly OK, due to a drip irrigation system, but the produce is not at its usual crazy level. Gone, entirely, are the greens (except herbs). In their place, root veggies have started to appear.

Apparently they've suffered an infestation of a potato beetle and so the potatoes are being dug up early and distributed. "Enjoy them while you can," is the general sentiment. Today's share included two pounds of tiny little potatoes. Also beets, carrots, and onions. Above ground, there were zucchini, fennel, cucumbers, and a few hot and sweet peppers. Tonight's dinner used up all of the potatoes and one of the onions.

I took all the carrots and made two pints of dilled carrots. It's unusual that I get carrots and dill heads in the same week so I took advantage of the situation and made the recipe correctly, for once! I also took the cucumbers, one of my two onions in the share, and two Hungarian Hot Wax peppers and made a spicy bread and butter pickle batch. Three pints.

Tomorrow evening, hopefully, I'll make chocolate zucchini bread.

Zucchini Season

The farm share seems to have experienced an early abundance of zucchini and summer squash. In anticipation of getting a lot more in the next few weeks, I decided to make zucchini relish today. I won't be making the cucumber relish that, in the past two years, won first place at the fair so zucchini relish will have to do. And, I do plan to enter this in the fair instead.

Using the zucchini relish recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, I chopped all the vegetables into a medium dice and put them in salt water for three hours. Then I cooked them with vinegar, sugar, water, and spices for 10 minutes. Lastly, I put them into four 8-oz jars and five 4-oz jars. The 4-oz jars will get added to my gift stash which, now, is at 18 jars. Two will be set aside for the fair and the rest are for us!

For fair purposes: 6 cups of zucchini and summer squash, 2 cups onion, 1 cup each red and green peppers. The liquid and spice measurements are the same as in the cookbook.

Another Round of Pickles

Since I won't be getting down to the farm where I sometimes buy pickling cukes anytime soon, I'm making an effort to pickle every cucumber I get from my farm share instead. Today's share had 2.5 pounds of cucumbers so I was able to make a half-batch of bread and butter pickles. Again using the Old Fashioned Bread and Butter Pickle recipe from The Joy of Pickling, I made two pints and three half pints. Two of the half pint jars will be set aside for the fair.

Tomorrow I'll take the zucchini and summer squash from the share and make zucchini relish. Hopefully there will be enough of that to enter into the fair as well.

Pickle Relish

Last year I made this recipe for golden pickle relish and it won first place in the Topsfield Fair. No pressure or anything....

Yesterday I mixed 6 cups of cucumbers, 2 cups of red onions (Red Long of Tropea, to be exact) and 2 cups of chopped green bell peppers with salt and let it all sit. Today I drained the veggies, mixed up the spices, sugar and Clear-Jel with vinegar and brought it all to a boil, then added the veggies, boiled again, and put it into jars. I used 5 8-ounce jars and 7 4-ounce jars, so I could start this year's gift stash.

Also, I started another gallon of yogurt. I've lost count, this is either batch 6 or 7 from that original packet of starter.  It'll be ready tomorrow.

Pickles from the Farm Share

This week, I needed to get the farm share early. We are still working through last week's share, but there's not too much left. Mainly just the greens, which take time. Today's share consisted of another head of garlic, 2.5 pounds potatoes, 1 bunch carrots, 1 bunch spring onions, 2 pounds zucchini, 3 pounds cucumbers, 4 turnips, a head of fennel, and some flowers. First thing I did when I got home was start a half-batch of bread and butter pickles, using almost all the cucumbers, the spring onions and 2 heads of garlic (I had one from last week).  After dinner and their 3.5 hour soak in salt, I made the pickles, using the same recipe for "Old Fashioned Bread and Butters" on page 95 in The Joy of Pickling. For fair purposes, as I intend to enter the 2 half-pint jars in the fair, there were 7 pickling cukes (just under 3 pounds), 2 heads of garlic and 5 spring onions (10 oz).

For dinner, I sautéed zucchini and carrots with scallions and a shallot and served them over chicken tortellini and a homemade alfredo sauce (2 eggs, 1 pint light cream, some pepper and nutmeg, and parmesan cheese, simmered until thick) and topped with shredded fresh basil. Fairly easy and quick, and everyone loved at least part of it - as you can imagine, the 10 year old had issues with the cooked vegetables. But did eat the cucumber and raw carrots at least...

Hardly Making a Dent

You should see my fridge.  Not only is the vegetable drawer stuffed with produce, the bottom 2 shelves are stuffed as well.  AND there is more in a basket on the table - all the squashes and potatoes and tomatillos.  Today I made another triple batch of eggplant caponata which came to 7 pints.  This is now in my gift stash.

A friend moved to a house that used to have a vineyard attached and has a lot of residual grape vines - Zinfandel and Concord, mostly.  Those Concord grapes were so sweet!  We brought home a bunch over the weekend and I've extracted almost 2 quarts of juice.  Later today I plan to heat it up, add sugar, and then put it back in the fridge for the kids to drink.  Grape juice is a bit of a novelty, since usually I don't buy juice.

Tonight for dinner I am going to make a soup with the head of escarole I got from the farm.  That'll be something new for us, and it'd be nice to eat some of the greens instead of giving it all to the bunny!

Inundated!

With all the produce I've gotten in the last week, and not being home for dinner as much as I'd like, I had a plan to get a lot done today.  First, though, I had to go to the mall, which took HOURS.  Shopping is not my favorite activity, but at least I was mostly shopping for someone else.  Since I got home, I have barreled through a half-batch of Salsa Verde (2 cups, and I left the hot pepper seeds in, so this batch is HOT) and a triple batch of Eggplant Caponata.  I just pulled 7 pints out of the canner.  The tiny little bit that was left in the pot went into tonight's pasta sauce, which also included sautéed eggplant, onions and peppers.

I'm hopeful I can do some pickling of beans tomorrow morning before I need to head in to work, and maybe start a batch of sauerkraut.  Then I'll feel like I've made enough progress before the next batch comes from the farm, which will be Tuesday...

Now We're Cooking With Gas

Well, we've always been cooking with gas in this house.  However, today we had to get our gas service turned off while workers switched the lines to our house to modern, plastic ones.  They promised us it would only take a few hours and then the gas company would be "right out" to turn it all back on again.

The workers showed up at 7 am.  At around 11:30 they shut off the gas, finished their part, and moved on.  They said the guy would be there shortly.  Well, he showed up around 6:30 pm.  So, for that time, we were without a stove, a dryer, and hot water.  Couldn't have been a more awkward time as I had started a batch of pickle relish in the morning and went and bought a half bushel of peaches for canning.  

All I managed to do tonight was to finish the pickle relish:  Grandmother's Golden Relish in The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  Instead of red and green peppers I used green peppers and red and yellow onions.  It's very sweet!  I got 8 and a half cups of relish.  Tomorrow I'll do what I can with the peaches.