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!

Project Completion

Today I finished a batch of sweet relish I started yesterday. First you have to salt the vegetables and let them sit overnight or, in this case, about a full day before you rinse them and boil them with the syrup. This is a variation of "Grandma's Golden Relish" from The Ball Complete Book of Canning. The changes were that I used half cucumbers (3 cups) and half zucchini (3 cups) and that all the peppers were green. This made 7.5 cups of relish.

I added the white wine to the sauerkraut and also added a little brine since there wasn't enough liquid to cover the cabbage. Now it can ferment for a few weeks in its crock and I shouldn't have to worry about it.

Lastly, I used up three eggplants making "Pickled Eggplant with Mint" from Preserving by the Pint. I didn't have red wine vinegar so I used up my tarragon and champagne vinegars and then made up the difference with cider vinegar. I hope that works - it might be a little harsh. For the mint, I harvested a bunch of stems from my pot of mint in the backyard. Supposedly this is good with some feta cheese and olive oil so I'll have to try that this winter.

After all this work, I can now see the back of the fridge again.

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.

Great Day at the Fair!

Dill Pickles, Apple Jelly, and Sweet Pickle Relish

It's a really cold day for the Fair, but that didn't stop us from heading up there to see how I did with all my canning entries. I'm so pleased to report that I won a ribbon in every class I entered. There was even some consistency in that 2 of the items were also entered in the Fair last year and they won the same place each time. I am also pleased that my friend Roxanne won lots of things, too, including the gift basket category; her basket was just beautiful. And she won not just in canning but in baking as well - cookies and cake!

Mulberry Jelly

Strawberry Jam

Bread and Butter Pickles

Blueberry Jam

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.

Done for Another Year

The Topsfield Fair ended yesterday and today I went and picked up my jars, the ribbons, and the cash prize ($16!).  I timed my trip up there so I could catch up with Roxanne, whom I missed on the day we were both there checking out who won what.  She brought me some ground up ghost peppers from her cousin.  I gave her a jar of mint jelly.  It was good to see her again!

The one thing that always makes me sad is that one jar of each flavor is wasted in the process of judging.  They open one, taste it a few times, and then don't refrigerate it.  Of course, it's gone bad by the time we get it back.  I do wish they could refrigerate all the open containers but it's probably just not feasible.

Happy Happy!

Mint Jelly

Hooray for the Topsfield Fair!

First thing we did was make a beeline for the canning exhibition to find that I won a ribbon of some sort in every category I entered.  How exciting!  I was also pleased to see that Roxanne, the woman I met last year, won a whole bunch of ribbons as well.

After that we looked at the crafts displays, the kids learned how to do needle felting, and we ate a lot of fair food.  We checked out the giant pumpkin (1900 pounds), the painted pumpkin displays, the sheep, goats, and bees.  Oh, and the rabbits.  The rabbits are so docile.  Mocha would likely scoff at all of them for being so...tame.

Sweet Pickle Relish

We watched the K-9 exhibition and a pig race and headed home.  The Mounties were not riding today, which was too bad.  They put on a terrific show.

Peach Jam

Seedless Raspberry Jam

Strawberry Jam

Spicy and Sweet

This morning I braved that Korean supermegamarket for the red pepper I needed to make my kimchi.  I needed four things when I went in there:  ginger, scallions, onions, and the red pepper powder.  I came out with four bags of groceries, and considered myself lucky!

For the kimchi, the cabbage was soaked in a brine last night and drained today, reserving the brine.  Then I mixed the cabbage with minced garlic, slivered scallions, a little sugar and salt, and the red pepper powder.  This was packed into a half-gallon jar and the brine poured over it, with the rest of the brine in a bag stuffed in the top.  Set aside to ferment, it claims it'll be ready in 3-6 days.

This afternoon I got to work on all those peppers.  I made a full batch of sweet pepper relish from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving, but used light green and dark green peppers rather than red and green.  Sadly, when they cook the greens converge into one dull olive color, much less festive than the last batch.  At the same time I made a half batch in which I threw all the hot peppers from the farm:  jalapeños, one tiny poblano, and 5 long evil-looking peppers which I think might be Thai hot peppers.  The final result is 3 pints of the sweet pepper relish and 3 cups of the spicy one, with 2 of those jars being the little 4 ounce ones which adds to my gift stash.

Relishing the Day

All in all, this wasn't really a great day.  Just a day.  But I did get some canning in and, well, I like puns, so here we are.  With so many things to relish.  Ha ha.

I stopped by the store this afternoon to get extra peppers in case my home grown ones weren't enough for the zucchini relish and I saw they had corn on sale.  $2 for a dozen!  I bought two dozen and some celery and got to work on both relishes when I got home.

First I cut up the zucchini, peppers and onion for the zucchini relish.  It has to be soaked in canning salt and water for 3 hours so I got that going.  All the peppers were from my garden and all the onion came from the farm share.  Then I worked on the corn relish.  I blanched 20 ears of corn and used my corn zipper to cut off the kernels.  I chopped up all my farm share peppers:  sweet, banana, and poblano and added them to the last 3 of my peppers and 2 store bought red peppers.  To this I added 1 bunch of celery and one onion, diced.  After dinner I made the corn relish (used the recipe on the pickyourown.org website) but I added Clearjel instead of flour paste.  I now have 9 pints of corn relish.

Currently the zucchini relish is simmering and is about to be canned.  I ended up with 1.5 times the recipe because I had so much zucchini - and I still have one more monster-mutant to go.  Not sure what I want to do with that one.  But I had given away all 3 jars of the first batch of this relish and wanted to make more because it is really good!

Zucchini Relish

I came home yesterday and discovered a friend had brought me a zucchini.  It wasn't your standard zucchini.  It was one of those late-summer-mutant-because-we-have-zucchini-coming-out-our-ears zucchinis.  HUGE.  Funny thing was, she hadn't even grown it.  She knows someone who gave her several and, being overloaded with zucchini, she brought one to me.

Having never made zucchini pickles before, I thought this presented an excellent opportunity.  There was a collection of zucchini recipes in that new Better Homes & Gardens canning book and, of all of them, the zucchini relish seemed the most different from the other pickles in my pantry.  It calls for 5 cups of finely chopped zucchini.  I got all that and a little more from this one mutant squash.  I also threw in a farm share onion and some peppers from my garden (and half a store bought red one, for color).  The recipe claims to make 5 half-pints but I ended up with 3 pints because all the veggies were in slightly larger amounts than called for.  I did keep the liquid and spice measurements the same and there was still more than enough liquid.

The cookbook claims this tastes good on fried green tomatoes.  That would imply that one is capable of making fried green tomatoes that don't look like little charred hockey pucks. Maybe I ought to try them again sometime...

Red Root Relish

Last year, we were getting beets all summer from the farm share and I was storing them up until they reached appropriate amounts and would pickle them. My mother-in-law really likes them, so I made sure to give her a few quarts. This year, I got beets exactly once. And only on the very last day. So I had 8 beets and a head of red cabbage from a previous week. To this I added some red peppers foraged from an abandoned vegetable garden at my husband's place of employment (the chef left but did not take his plants, and the new chef wasn't interested in gardening, I guess) and made Red Root Relish.

The recipe came from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and was easy. The recipe says it makes 4 pints; I got 3.5. It's very dark red and pretty and it smells great!

We also tried the radish relish on some crackers. I like it. My husband, who likes neither radish nor fennel, declared it, "Not as bad as I anticipated."

Ralish?

What else would you name a radish relish?

One night, over a year ago, I was websurfing and came across this recipe for Pickled Radish Relish. I printed out the recipe and tucked it into my cookbook just in case I ever had 3 cups worth of radish. Well, the farm share has had Daikon radishes and I discovered that trying to eat them grated into salad was just too much for our mouths to handle. By chance I rediscovered the printout of this recipe and thought maybe it was worth trying.

Absolutely, yes!

For this batch I used Daikon radish, which is fairly sweet once pickled. Instead of celery I used celeriac stems, which added almost a fennel-like flavor. I used white vinegar. It's festive looking: white radish, purple onion and green celeriac. The recipe makes 2 pints, which is good to know because it doesn't specify on their web page.

That website had a few other interesting recipes but this is the first I've tried. Perhaps I'll have to go try some more!