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. 

Making Room

Well, it's official. I have signed the contract to build my new cabinets for the kitchen, and am about to sign the contract for the whole reconstruction. After over two years of planning, we're going to tear apart a significant part of the house and hopefully at the end of it I will have the kitchen of my dreams. 

But, until then, I have food to prepare, and things to can, and a kitchen and several bathrooms to pack up. This is the part about which I'm most anxious. What do I pack? What do I leave out? What if I need that thing? 

One thing I do know is that I'll be down to one fridge. I admit, I'm rather spoiled to have two. I use the one in the basement for extra cartons of milk and cream, all my flour, all the meat I keep in the freezer, and extra produce from the farm share that usually can last a long time in the fridge: cabbage, carrots, beets. Well, I started the cabbage fermenting last week, and now it was time to tackle the beets. After all, 10 pounds of beets takes up a lot of space that I could be using for other things. Since it's about to become the primary fridge I need to make room.

So. Now I have five quarts of pickled beets and some prepared golden beets ready to make into cake and for me to eat. No one else in the family eats them, at least, not voluntarily. The kids won't touch them at all, unless they've been made into cake. 

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. 

Figured It Out

When I made the dilled beans, one of my jars broke. I wasn't entirely sure why. Today, I was making bread and butter pickles and had a jar break again which is a bummer but that led to me finally understanding what is happening.

Since I've gotten my new stove the burners are much hotter. So if I put the jars on the counter next to the canning pot, the heat from the burner radiates out the side and gets the jar hotter than boiling water. So, when the jar is placed in the canner, the temperature differential causes the jar to break. This doesn't happen with jam, only pickles, because with pickles the jars have to sit while I get them all filled before I pour in the liquid, so they have more of an opportunity to get hot. 

Now that I know, I can change my workflow to avoid this. 

I did end up with four pints of bread and butter pickles, using cucumbers from the farm share and from my garden, plus a Hungarian hot wax pepper for a little heat. The kind of heat that doesn't crack jars, at least.

Thunder Clouds

As I drove to get the farm share today, I saw big white fluffy clouds on the horizon. I wondered if I might get rained on. The answer was Yes, and then some...

I'm not sure why this is, but I'm always picking green beans whenever I get caught in a thunderstorm at the farm. Today was no exception. The share was for unlimited beans, and I wanted to can some dilly beans, so I continued to pick, soaked through in the heavy rain, with thunder all around me (thankfully I did not see any lightning) as I gathered as many of the smaller, more tender beans I could find and some dill flower heads. Ultimately I had enough for 3 pints of dilly beans.

Which are now 2 pints. One of the jars cracked in the canner and the bottom fell off. Whoops. 

Purslane

For weeks now, at the farm share I've been eyeing the purslane that is growing like, well, a weed, in the kale patch. Last week they said we could pick it, but I didn't have time. This week I planned for it and picked about half a pound of it. It's ubiquitous and does well as a ground cover in between crops. I had pickled some once before but couldn't find the recipe so I made this one instead. I used a mixture of white, cider and rice wine vinegar because I didn't have enough of the cider vinegar for a double batch. Also, the dill at the farm is fully in flower and that's perfect for making pickles as a few flower heads per jar works better than dill seeds.

In the share was the beginning of a cucumber crop and, with a couple of cucumbers from my patio garden, I made one pint of dill pickles that I didn't process in the canner. Instead, I'm treating them as refrigerator pickles, just like the purslane. I'll let them sit for a week before tasting them. I'm sure there will be more cucumbers in the next share and maybe I'll plan to make bread and butter pickles then. 

Last Step in the Process

Yesterday I cut the last two pounds of Jerusalem artichokes thinly, along with some turmeric root, and brined them. This morning I made the vinegar solution: cider vinegar, rice vinegar (I didn't have white wine vinegar), water, cloves, chili peppers, bay leaves, sugar and mustard powder. Apparently I ran out of mustard seeds and forgot to get more so I just added more powder instead.

All this made 6 8-ounce jars of pickles which I processed in boiling water for 10 minutes and let rest for 5 before removing from the canner. They're cooling now. One jar is a little emptier than the rest, I'll use that one to test the pickles in about a week or so.

Now the only thing left is the fermentation of the other pickles which should be for about 5 more days at the minimum. Hopefully they'll be a successful experiment!

Four Weeks of Beets

For the last four weeks I've picked up the full share of beets from the farm. I tried specifically to get the smallest ones so I could pickle them whole, which I prefer. Today I had a chunk of time so spent the whole morning preparing and then pickling them. It's a good thing I did - the beets almost overflowed my 8 qt. stockpot!

With that many beets, I tripled the recipe for the liquid (The Ball Complete Book of Canning, page 311) and came away with 5 quarts of pickled beets; one quart was divided into two pint jars for the fair. There was another pint and a half that didn't fit into a jar so I poured the rest of the pickling liquid over them and they're in the fridge for salads this week.

I was supposed to help my neighbors pick apples from their tree; the other day I stopped by on their behalf and there were a whole bunch of apples there. Today I went to help them and there were exactly 3 apples. There was no sign that the apples had fallen, the driveway and yard around the base of the tree were as clean as a whistle. Do people go around and steal fruit from people's trees? Is that a thing? Weird.

Two Weeks Later

And my Sweet Icicle Pickles have finally been canned! After they sit in a brine for a week, then they have a day in which they sit in freshly boiled water. Then a syrup of vinegar, sugar and spices is boiled and ladled over the pickles. Then daily for 4 more days the syrup is drained, boiled, and repoured over the pickles. Finally, today, they got canned.

I did try one the other day and it wasn't as sweet as my nose was telling me it would be. They also had more of a crunch than I was expecting. I guess all this work is worth it, after all. I did set aside two smaller jars for the fair so now I have 6 entries so far. There should be a few more before the end of this month - entries are due by September 3 so I have to get going!

Fun with the Farm Share

The farm's cucumbers are still going strong so today I brought home just under 4 pounds and am making "Icicle Pickles." These are fermented for a week and then rinsed daily for a few days and then pickled. I'm not really sure. As I've never made them before, it'll be interesting to see how they come out. So far, I've made the brine and cut the cucumbers into spears and they are in two half-gallon jars to ferment.

I also started a batch of bread with parsley in it; when I go to make the dough into rolls (or loaves, I haven't decided yet) I will add minced garlic. The bread recipe called for bread flour and rye flour, I had neither so I used a combination of white whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, and corn flour. More experimentation, I guess.

Also in the farm share: lots of tiny little beets. I plan to make pickled beets using only these small ones. I like that better than chunks of bigger ones. Tonight for dinner we're having a big salad with blackberries, a cucumber, pepper and carrot from the share. Tomorrow I will cook and chill green beans and tiny little potatoes to dip into a cheese fondue. It's sometimes hard for me to be creative with vegetables in a way that the youngerchild might eat. I do have a large zucchini destined to become chocolate zucchini bread. That one is always a favorite.

Baby Carrots

Whenever we hear the adjective "baby" applied to anything like carrots, or other foods, or woolen things, we have to suppress a giggle or two. You see, almost 20 years ago we were in Peru for a long trip. During that time, vendors would always try to entice us to buy things. They would say, "Alpaca...baby alpaca," hoping we would be fooled into buying their machine-made woven or knitted goods which didn't have much or any alpaca wool in them, baby or otherwise. We learned quickly to identify the quality goods from the rest and did come back with many nice things (see photo, hands down the nicest hand woven blanket we saw), but navigating the street vendors was always a challenge. It did get easier as our Spanish got better although nothing could mask our appearance as tourists. You can understand why labeling something as "baby" automatically raises a red flag for us.

Baby carrots in the grocery store are, for the most part, not young carrots at all but larger carrots cut to look small. Not so with the farm share! Tuesday's pick up included two pounds of carrots and I made a point of finding the smallest ones I could get out of the bin. When each carrot weighs maybe half an ounce it took a while.

Today I set about making pickled carrots (Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 312) and I peeled each and every one of those little carrots. I even left their little stem end on, so they look like the ones you sometimes get in fancy restaurants. These are truly baby carrots and they make me happy just to look at them! I plan to enter them in the fair, and it's cutting it pretty close in terms of them have enough time in the vinegar brine to be fully pickled by the time the judges taste them. This is certainly the last pickle I'll be able to enter this year.

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.

Prizewinners!

We went up this morning in the rain to spend the day at the fair. In addition to all the canned goods I entered, I decided to make cupcakes to enter in the baking competition. I am on a carrot cake kick so I made carrot cake cupcakes. I had to enter a plate of 6 of them.

When we got to the fair we immediately went to drop them off and check out the canned goods section. I did quite well, with first place for: soup, sauerkraut, and sweet relish. Second place for: the collection of three jellies (the ones with the wine that I banged out in a few hours the night before I had to take everything up), other pickled vegetable, Concord grape jelly and apple jelly. Third place for the strawberry jalapeño jam. Honorable mentions for: wild blueberry jam and ginger peach jam. Only three entries did not place: salsa, mulberry jelly, and apricot ginger jam.

We wandered around the fair for a few hours while we waited for the cupcake judging. We checked out the rabbits, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats. I got nose-booped by a calf named Bella. We watched a little bit of the junior cattle show and visited the beekeepers exhibits. I held a 1-2 day old chick. Ate a bunch of fair food, ran into a few people we knew and shared a table with a few we didn't (but know now!). And we got back in time to watch them judge the cupcakes. We felt it was a very good sign that one of the two judges didn't want to give up the plate with my cupcake on it! And, at then end, I'd won first place!

Now I'm home, working on a beet and goat cheese tart for dinner with friends. And there are more of those prizewinning carrot cake cupcakes for dessert!

Dill Pickles of Various Kinds

This afternoon I picked up the farm share and, as my friend with whom I split it is away for a few days, I needed to deal with a larger portion of it. I also received some tomatoes, eggplant and celery from my mason. I do have a plan to can the tomatoes and celery and in the pressure canner but I didn't have enough time today. Instead, I made dilled carrots and beans and, when I ran out of those, one pint of dill cucumber pickles. All the vegetables were from today's share.

Since I made two jars of the carrots and beans very pretty, I will enter them in the fair. For later: 3 cups white vinegar, 1 cup water, 1/4 cup kosher salt. Each pint jar had one head of dill, one dried chili pepper, and 1/2 of a clove of garlic. The carrots and beans were packed in so they alternated along the outside, like so:

These, plus the cucumbers, were processed for 10 minutes and then they rested for 5 before I took them out of the canner.

Also in the share: peppers, zucchini, eggplant, lettuce, beets, broccoli rabe, tomatillos, hot peppers, parsley, cilantro, dill, blackberries, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. I'm going to have to eat all the fruit before she comes back, but there is a lot for her to enjoy.

Starting to Pick Up

Obviously, since we were away last week, we missed the farm share. This week, there were more squashes and carrots and fewer greens. And the volume increased dramatically. Here's what I'm keeping as my half:

1 pound cucumbers, already fermenting into half-sours
1 head of lettuce
1 head of green cabbage
1 qt. blackberries (half for eating, half for making peach-blackberry jam, using the peaches from my tree which are just starting to get ripe)
.75 lbs carrots
1 eggplant
2 pounds beets, which I will pickle and give some to my friend
1 bunch parsley

The cucumbers were washed, shoved in a jar with crushed coriander seeds, crushed mixed peppercorns, garlic, bay, and dill seeds and then a brine (1/2 T. Kosher salt per cup of water) poured over top. They're now sitting with a bag of brine on top, and will take about a week to ferment. 

Accomplishments

After making all that apricot jam, I left the canner out for a few days, hoping it would inspire me to work on those fiddleheads I'd bought. It did; today I pickled them and got three 8-ounce jars of garlic fiddlehead pickles. I followed this recipe but changed one thing, mainly that I used champagne vinegar rather than white wine vinegar. The champagne vinegar is from the batch I made a while back. Also, I'm not sure why it says not to submerge the jars when canning; I did submerge and can them the usual way and they sealed up perfectly.

A little blurry but you get the idea...

The other things I managed to get done today were to get the "yurt" ready for summer and wrap up the soaps I made last month with my friend. Several years ago I bought one of those backyard tent things that you can put a table and chairs in and then enjoy your dinner without all the mosquitos. Ours happens to be hexagonal so looks more like a yurt than anything, although I think it's officially a gazebo. Every year we have to hang up the curtains; I made the mistake one year of hanging them up too soon and the stormy spring weather tore off all the velcro straps so I wait now until the weather finally calms down and the pollen surges have passed.

My honey-beeswax-lavender-rosemary soaps finally finished curing and I wrapped them in parchment paper with little labels so we can either use them here or give as gifts. Two were already gifted so I only have six left. However, each bar lasts a fairly long time; and I still have other bars of soap from my friend to use here if I decide to give them all away.

Pickled Beets, Always More Work Than I Think

The last distribution of the farm share was yesterday and there were no more beets. That meant that I could get all the beets I'd been saving pickled, finally. I have a note next to my recipe to double the liquid, which I did. But, first, I had to make my own pickling spice as I seem to have run out. I couldn't find any in the cupboard.

Pickling spice: bay, cinnamon stick, coriander seeds, cardamom, mustard seeds, dill seeds, whole allspice, cloves, ground ginger, crushed red pepper, and black peppercorns. Some people also add juniper berries which is one of the reasons I don't often buy it pre-made. No sense in making something to which I'm allergic!

So. Using the recipe for pickled beets in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, but doubling the liquid, I made enough pickled beets to fill three quart jars. The beets themselves took a long time to cook and slip the skins off. If I had to guess, I'd say that they longer they were in the fridge, the harder it was to remove the skins.

What do I have left? Six pounds of sweet potatoes. Two large bowls of squash: 3 butternut, 5 delicata, 2 acorn, 3 carnival. 3 cobs of popcorn. About 5 pounds of onions. 6 leeks and 2 bunches of scallions. Some escarole, lettuce, arugula, kale, chard, parsley, bok choy, and broccoli. 1 green pepper and about 6 red meat radishes. Nothing particularly cannable. Unless I want to cube up the squash and can that. Maybe...

Weeds You Can Eat

The weather continues to be bad. There will be no peaches at the farm which usually has the best peaches around. Apparently they have no crop because the winter was so crazy and the buds froze. I will check the one other peach orchard I usually frequent but I don't have a lot of hope about that. There are no blackberries either.

What is doing well? The weeds. Purslane in particular is going crazy this year. I'd come across a recipe for pickled purslane a few years ago but this year I actually had enough purslane in my yard (topped off with a little from the farm where I get my share) to make this recipe for pickled purslane. It's a refrigerator pickle, so no processing. Just clean the purslane, boil the vinegar, water and spices, and combine in a one-quart wide mouth jar. Voilá.

On my agenda this weekend: bread, cheese bread, yogurt, granola, maybe some chocolate zucchini bread. Maybe more pickles. I have a lot of zucchini, cucumbers and carrots from the farm share. I might make a batch of eggplant caponata if I have time. The fridge is quite full!

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.