Putting Food Up

Putting food up is a lot of work. These pears along with a couple more bags sat in the kitchen a week until I summoned the courage to sit and cut them all, lug out the heavier than heck cider press, grind them, press them and then make pear butter from the pressings.

Meanwhile Scott’s been slowly plugging away at making marinaras with the tomatoes. 5 quarts are in the pantry, only 19 more to make! A few years ago we made it a goal to put 24 quarts up, which would give us a spaghetti dinner every other week or so until the next tomato season. Just thinking about 19 more makes me want to take a nap. It’s so worth it though when you taste it. Home canned marinara is so much more delicious than anything you can buy. We upped our canning ability this year by investing in a pressure canner. Our first pressure canned experiment was salsa.

The corn was all harvested, but that’s easy to put up. Just cut it off the cob and into ziplocks for the freezer. I think this year our harvest should carry us most of the way through the winter.

I had to do a little surgery in one of my hives last week. Somehow, somewhere along the line, someone left a one inch gap between frames in the bottom box and the ladies filled that space up with comb. I spent all summer fretting over having to deal with it. At a recent beekeeping get together a wiser beekeeper encouraged me to just get in and take care of business and I did. Not only did the lovely ladies create an easy to pop out full wall of comb between the frames, but it was almost entirely empty of brood. Phew!

Last weekend my younger son and I went to a bee harvesting event where we helped harvest honey from three different colonies, all in different locations. We started with the honey from the Sonoma Garden Park. See the color above?

Well, we ended with honey from Glen Ellen, the next town north, just a few miles up the road for those not familiar with the area. Look how much darker it is! It’s a nice group of beekeepers we have here in Sonoma. Such interesting people. It was a good day.

Inspiring way to store your produce

Wow, I’m so inspired by this video, look at the incredibly beautiful way she stores her vegetables. We have a fairly small fridge for American standards and I know as these boys grow older and hungrier, I’m going to have to get creative with food storage. Why aren’t these containers being sold yet?

I love how the basis behind her project is about saving traditional oral knowledge passed down generation by generation. You can read more at her website here.

More food storage suggestions.

The mystery of the popping jam lids…

I feel so fortunate to have moved into a house with so many seasonal bouquet ingredients growing everywhere you look!

I just love this time of year, everything is so beautiful outside. We’ve been making a list of garden tasks that need to be done before winter sets in…the list, it’s long! Since we’ve moved in we haven’t been able to spend as much time getting the garden going as we had hoped. Our focus has been on the house and hopefully we can get all our projects done so that the next growing season we can turn our thoughts fully to the outside. Because our focus has been off the garden we haven’t had as much to put up or preserve. This time last year, we had 26 quart jars of tomato sauce put up. 16 jars of peaches, 10 bags of frozen nectarines, and well over a dozen jars of jam in the pantry, catsup, chutney’s, barbecue sauces etc. This year we maybe got a measly amount canned or frozen. Nothing went to waste, we ate or gave away all our fruit, but we just didn’t have the energy or produce to do more.

With the little we did get canned, we had a bit of a disaster. In fact what happen still remains a mystery. Last week, when our oldest was making his almond butter and jelly sandwich he ran out of jam. We reached for a new jar to find that the seal had popped. We reached for another one, that too had been broken. Seven jars, all their seals broken! These were all different jams, canned from different times of the year. As we tend to be a bit conservative on the food safety meter, we threw them all away, who knows how long they had been unsealed. Uhg. Then this past Sunday we were all sitting in the kitchen. Praire Home Companion was playing on the radio, I was cutting Scott’s hair, the boys were again packing their lunch snacks into little containers and we heard a loud ‘poink’ come from the pantry. Not again! Another jam lid popped.

Those of you who do their own canning, know that ‘ping’ sound that you hear when the jars seal. It’s a soul satisfying sound that gives you an inner happiness. A happiness to know that the job you did was successful, that you have worked to preserve a little bit of summer that will nourish your family in the dark months, that you are somehow connected to previous generations, oh I could go on and on. Hearing that ‘poink’ sound of a jar unsealing randomly in the pantry gives you pretty much the opposite feeling.

Do you have any idea why this happened? Our suspicion is that we got a bum package of lids. Only some of the lids have popped, so I don’t think it wasn’t some sort of atmospheric condition. It wasn’t a bad canning job, as they were different jams done over different times of the year. And this only happened with the small mouth jar lids, none of the large mouth lids have popped…yet! If you have any insight, I’d love to hear it.

How to Make Apple Vinegar – so very easy

I have a new project for you to try this weekend, making apple vinegar. This is the second fruit vinegar I’ve made and its really tasty and so very easy to make. First thing is that you’ll have to make an apple pie or apple tart or apple sauce this weekend. Make anything where you need to core and peel the apples. Save those cores and peels and put them into a bowl. The number of peels or apples isn’t really important, just add enough water to cover the apple scraps by an inch or two. Add a 1/4 c. of sugar to the mix, cover with a small plate and weight it down. In my case I did this with a ramekin filled with water.

Let it sit out, covered with a tea towel (to keep flies from getting in) for a week, until the liquid darkens. Yes, a little mold will form on top, that’s okay. Really.

Just spoon it off. After a week, strain out the apples and pour the soon-to-be-vinegar into a canning jar, fit with a square of cheesecloth and canning lid. This allows the vinegar to breath as well as keeps it from touching the metal, otherwise the metal will corrode. Leave it alone in your pantry for 6 weeks and then you’ll have vinegar. So easy, isn’t it?

I learned this method in the book Wild Fermentation, which is a great book to own and refer to. Happy vinegar making!

on making apple cider

Tonight we made some more cider and tonight I brought my camera out with us. First, it starts with a huge amount of apples. As we were sitting together chopping apples into quarters and taking out any worms we saw, we remarked that the only way you’d be able to afford to make cider is if you had your own apples trees, because it takes a lot of apples to make cider! To buy apples for this endeavour would cost a fortune!

When I began researching apple presses I had narrowed it down to two, one from Happy Valley Cider Presses and the one we got from Pleasant Hill Grain (we got the MacIntosh press). There aren’t many reviews of apple cider presses out there, so we had to go on educated guesses and personal preferences. We in the end decided on the mostly metal construction with the oak tub, rather than the all pine construction. In hopes that we will live in this house forever, that means pressing a lot of cider and all metal construction seems more durable than pine. It was a little more expensive in the end, but I’m happy with our decision. This model came with a separate grinder, whereas the Happy Valley press came with a grinder that emptied straight into the tub, which I kind of liked the idea of, honestly. No worries though, this doesn’t seem to slow us down.

After quartering the apples, you send them through the grinder so that the press can extract the most juice as possible.

Then you place the grinds into a mesh bag which sits in the press and away you crank. What we also liked about this press is that the entire red metal top, folds down so that you can easily clean the tub and take the fruit in and out easily.

Isn’t the press beautiful? The grinder too, I think. There is something about well made, quality constructed, simple things that I find so beautiful. I want to put this press on a table for display.

Pressing cider is certainly a group effort. While one person presses, another person has to hold the jug to fill. This year I feel, we are just getting used to this contraption, what it can do, how the juice tastes, what different things we can press. Next year I want to host a cider pressing party.

Because like I said, you need an amazing amount of apples to make a small amount of cider, so we need all the help we can get! We’ve filled a few bottles for the freezer too. What fun! I doubt our family is immune to the stresses that every other family feels. We too worry about all sorts of things that other people are worrying about in this day and age, we get frusterated with our kids and each other. But there are times when we get to do something like this, that slows us down and makes us appreciate simple things, like cider, solid construction, each others company, and adds a little richness to our every day. And sometimes I think that’s what it’s all about. Adding that bit of beauty and richness into our daily lives, that makes it all worth living for. Cheers!

Plants & Marmalade

This weekend was marmalade weekend (a view of last year’s marmalade weekend)! My favorite kind of weekend, as marmalade is one of my favorite things. We had a fantastic bounty of oranges from our little tree this year. It was about one paper grocery bag full of oranges. We ate quite a few, but most were saved for marmalade.

It amazes me that we are able to grow oranges. They just seem like such tropical little gems. Have you read The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow? It is one of our favorites. As the story goes, a little boy named Danny drops an orange out of his lunch box in a Swedish forest. The creatures of the forest think that the sun laid an egg until a bird corrects them that it is an orange. When winter comes and the birds migrate south, they take the little wood fairy with them to see the oranges grow and she gets a little straw and sucks the juice out of the oranges. So if ever you get a dry orange it is because the fairy had a drink of it’s juice, and really, you don’t mind sharing, do you? It seems the fairy skipped our yard this year, because all were juicy and delicious.

We did more work clearing out and harvesting what was in the ground in order to make room for new things.

We had a few hours without boys on Saturday and were able to take the baby girl with us to the nursery to casually walk and browse. It was so luxurious and reminded us of our pre-child days when those slow visits to the nursery were commonplace. We indulged and bought a whole slew of new plants, kale, half-priced onions, romanesco broccoli, blueberries(!) and a handful of flowers for my flowerbeds which are getting a major redo this year. Two hydrangeas for in front of the cottage, a new rudbeckia, a tea tree for a sunny hot spot and a few penstemon to make my bed more water wise.

Oh, I’ve been experimenting around a bit, both in the kitchen & with body care things that I can’t wait to share! To come soon.

Catching up on the Harvest

My apologies for the lack of posting, especially when it is prime growing/harvesting/preserving season. There is so much to share and I think of blog posts often, but as those of you who have been 36 weeks pregnant before will know, a lot of ideas get left undone. The couch and knitting always seem to be a better alternative to any activity these days. But we (and by we, I mean Scott) have been doing a lot these days. Mind if I share quickly with photos?

We’ve been slooowly picking tomatoes. We didn’t pick our first until after the first of August, which is about a month later than usual due to this cool summer we’ve had (thank you weather gods!). Surprisingly the first two tomatoes were the biggest we’ve grown, this varietal is called Italian Heirloom which we’ve grown for a few years and really enjoy. Very meaty and great for both BLT’s and tomato sauce. Scott canned our first round of tomato sauce, five jars. We’ve gone from doing huge all day canning sessions to small batches done early, early in the morning. It all seems much more manageable that way.

We still believe that Ali Baba is the best watermelon we can grow.


Although these Orangeglo melons are pretty darn good. Sweet as can be although the boys won’t eat it because they can’t get over the fact that it looks like pumpkin.

Have you had padron peppers before? We are growing two plants this year that we bought at the Sonoma Garden Park plant sale. These sauteed in a hot pan with olive oil and then sprinkled with maldon sea salt make an incredible side dish. Some are hot and some are mild enough for little kids to eat.

Our golden delicious apples are ready for the picking so we’ve started on apple sauce and of course an apple pie.

What’s been going on in your neck of the woods?

Another weekend of preserving

The peaches have ripened and this has been our biggest crop yet! Besides giving bags and bags away to our friends, we’ve put up 11 jars of peaches (with more to do tomorrow), made cobbler, pie and frozen countless ziplock bags full of quartered slices to use for future pies and smoothies.

For the first time this year we’ve had to put up makeshift support beams to keep the branches from breaking off. Slowly, yet surely these branches are straightening up as we pick them off.

The last of the nectarines and two giant ‘forgotten about’ zucchinis lay cut up in the sunshine for drying.

Preserving food for the future months is something I never thought would fill me with such satisfaction. Seeing our cupboards and freezer fill up with neat, colorful, edible packages is like money in the bank to me.

Tell me, are you doing any preserving this weekend?

Let the Summer of Canning Begin!

I mentioned a while back that instead of canning our cherry plums right away, we stuck them in the freezer to wait until canning inspiration hit. Well, we decided that inspiration could wait no longer and it was time to get on it, so 11 jars of cherry plum jam were made last week. Which was just in time, because the nectarines were right behind and 11 jars of nectarine jam were canned. This year, we don’t know why, but our fruit trees are producing like gangbusters. We *almost* feel overwhelmed, almost. Okay, we are overwhelmed with what to do with all this fruit, because just as we finished canning the nectarine jam, ripe peaches started falling off our peach tree.

On Sunday we put on our walking shoes and filled bags with fruit and headed out to all our friends houses within walking distance for a fruit delivery.

Back to the nectarine jam. I don’t think we’ve made it before and I’m not really sure why, because it is so delicious! We pitted a whole bunch of nectarines, added sugar, a little honey and let it simmer and reduce down. We don’t add pectin to our jams, we just let the natural pectins and sugar mix together with ample simmering until they work their magic.

Once the jam gets to this stage above, where not only does it leave a trace behind when you stir it, but that it falls off the spoon just like this: in clumps, then it is ready to can. And can we did.

I’m thinking that this year, we need a new set of canning label designs, don’t we? I should get started on that.

Meanwhile I hear Scott in the kitchen canning the first of the peaches, I should go help him.

Warming up to Summer Preserving

We haven’t yet gotten into canning this year. Our cherry plums all ripened on one of the hottest weekends so far, so we gathered them and put them into gallon sized ziplocks to wait for a cooler time to can. But we have been playing around with pickling. We got our first successful cauliflower harvest this year! We’ve tried in the past and either they went straight to bloom or were covered in bugs – yuck! But this year for some reason, Lady Luck was with us in the cauliflower department.

We tend to like everything pickled so we thought we’d give pickled cauliflower a try. We had a few ripe zucchinis too so we threw those in for good measure. It worked out incredibly and now our two boys declare cauliflower their favorite! Any method of preparing veggies that makes them the favorite of a 3 & 5 year old set of boys is welcome in my book. Here is how we did it.

Pickled Cauliflower

For the brine:
4 c. white vinegar
2 c. water
3 T. salt

Into each jar: a heaping Tablespoon of pickling spices (we get ours from Penzeys) & 3 garlic cloves sliced
Blanch the cauliflower by blanching in hot water briefly, lift it out and place it into ice water. Zucchini only needs a 30 second blanch. Place cooled veggies into jars and cover with brine. Refrigerate and enjoy!

The other recipe we tried was for zucchini from a new book called La Cucinathat has become Scott’s new bible. The book is an exhaustive collection of recipes gathered by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina. They traveled all over Italy talking to every nona they could and gathered over 2,000 recipes to create this archive. It is a huge book! Anyway, this recipe for zucchini asks you to slice them and lay them in the sun until dry. We didn’t know exactly how long or how dry they meant so we just left them out until the outside skins were dry – a few hours. Saute them in olive oil. And layer them with chopped mint, raw garlic and a healthy sprinkle of vinegar (they suggest white wine vinegar, we used just plain white vinegar). The immediate results are fairly unimpressive. We had it right afterwards for dinner and weren’t that excited about it. However, the next couple of days I pulled them out of the fridge and had them for lunch and they were incredible. This recipes really does need to sit at least for 24 hours. I look forward to making this again.

Have you done any summer preserving yet?