In A Pickle

I have to admit, I was a little shocked to realize it's been nearly a month since a new post graced this little corner of cyberspace. The thing is, I'm almost always working on a blog post in my head and it's a bit surprising to realize that not a single one of those thoughts have actually made it out of my fingertips and into reality.

As I'm apt to do this time of year, I'm feeling a nudge for some change in my life. But when I really look at things, it seems that maybe things already are changing. In the last few years, I've devoted so much energy to being a "writer," yet somehow, in the last few months I've been watching what feels like all of that focus and resolve draining away. Last month, for the first time ever, I turned down a freelance job from a gig that I've been doing since November 2009. Despite my intentions to be the best freelancer/blogger ever this summer, even with a full-time job, somehow I've barely blogged or written a word. (Have you noticed?!) Other things that have given my life structure in the past have been missing this year too, from regular ice fishing trips in the winter to blueberry picking and canning peaches this summer.

It's all a bit discomfiting and as a result, I've been suffering through an endless case of the "mean reds." You know the mean reds, don't you? As Holly Golightly put in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of."

What I didn't realize when I started chasing my crazy marathon dream this spring was how much energy it would require and how it would dominate my free time. Even only running somewhere between 9-12 miles each week sucks up a great deal of my free time in the mornings since I tend to run on work day mornings. The mornings I don't run are spent cleaning the bathroom and other exciting household chores. The running's been a good thing and my body is stronger (and slimmer) than it has been in years. I'm also happy to report that the childbearing hips I'd been developing over the last couple years are now a distant (and unpleasant) memory.


But if this all just sounds rather depressing, what I'm really trying to say it that there's only so much time in each day. Our priorities dictate how we use that limited time and apparently priorities have been changing around here.

The garden has been in hardcore harvest mode for the last month or so and has been demanding a fair amount of attention. I've been canning (dilly beans and pickled carrots and daikon radishes pictured below) and freezing (16 lbs of green beans and at least that much again of kohlrabi) and drying (mint and oregano), whirring (pesto) and shredding (zucchini). I'd say we're at least at the halfway point for harvest 2013 and we have been blessed with another bountiful year. That said, I never want to blanch another green bean ever again. Well, at least not until next year.

We had a strange hot spell at the end of August that really tested everyone's good humor. At times such as those, I'm especially happy to live only an hour away from a Great Lake. When it's 95 degrees at your home, it's lovely to go spend some time next to what essentially is a very foggy refrigerator.

We finally pulled up all of our giant kohlrabi (and blanched it and froze it, oy). The biggest kohlrabi (below) ended up weighing in at 6.5 lbs. Not quite the 8 lbs promised on the packaging, but still a pretty impressive cruciferous vegetable specimen. I'm usually not for giant vegetables (probably because the only vegetables I've ever encountered in giant form are zucchinis) but I found a fair amount of Wallace and Gromit-ish pleasure in our large kohlrabi.

 

Speaking of beautiful vegetables, check out these beautiful Yukon Gold potatoes we pulled out of a rotting pile of straw. We hadn't really planned on doing the Stout method of gardening again (basically, where you put seed potatoes on the ground and cover them with straw and forget about them) but I'm so glad we did.

Andy and I had to run into town last weekend to attend his cousin's wedding celebration, which was a lovely event with really, really good eats. We didn't stay too long, but did manage to capture the most truthful photo of the two of us at a social gathering ever taken. Ha. Hahahahaha.

 

This weekend, my friend Sarah comes to stay with us and I'm so excited to have her up when the world is not either totally frozen (February) or one mucky mess (April). I'm not sure what we'll get up to exactly, but I'm looking forward to it immensely.

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Can You Can It? Yes, You Can!

I'm pretty lousy at phone conversations. When people pose the inevitable questions of, "So, what's new with you?" I always clam up. "Work, make dinner, sleep, repeat" is all that ever pops into my mind as an answer. Luckily, when I was chatting with my friend Betsy, she helped me flush out my usual lame answer. "I notice that you've been canning all the food," she said.

Why yes, I did can all the food this summer. The proof is in the pudding . . .err, in the mason jars really. Here's a run down of everything that made a trip through my hot water bath canner in the last three months or so:

Peach Salsa

 8 pints. Recipe from yours truly, but with some pointers from Ball's Blue Book of Preserving to help ensure that it's safe for the hot water bath canner. I sure hope we don't get botulism. So far so good.

Applesauce

8 pints. No real recipe here- just a splash of water to get the apples cooking (and not sticking), then sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg to taste. Applesauce has to be one of the simpler pleasures in life. So good when stirred into oatmeal, or eaten straight out of the jar.

Barbeque Sauce

6 pints. A double batch of the "Best Barbecue Sauce" from Mel's Kitchen Cafe. We use a fair amount of it during the summer grilling season and one pint jar is just the right amount for a batch of pulled pork sandwiches.

Blueberry Butter

8 half pints. Recipe from Food in Jars. I wanted to get some of the berry harvest into jars but I'm not a huge fan of just plain blueberry jam. (I mean, I'll eat it but . . . ) so this seems like a good, less sugary alternative. It really does taste like blueberry pie on toast. 

Blueberry Pie Filling

4+ quarts. Or you could just can some blueberry pie filling. This recipe merges my pie filling recipe and a recipe specially for canned blueberry pie filling.  Because I'm a cranky old lady before my time, I will not share the recipe, but will tell you that it involves sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla.

Bread and Butter Pickles

5 pints. We had a bumper crop of cucumbers this year and I wanted to make pickles for the first time. This is my coworker's mother's recipe and it is delicious. I was especially pleased that the cucumbers retained most of their crispness. Not sure if that's because I added "pickle crunch" (calcium chloride) while they soaked, or if homemade bread and butter pickles just have less problems with getting "soggy." 

Dilly Beans

4 pints. We were also up to our ears with green beans in September, so when I could not chop, blanch, or freeze another green bean, I made a batch of dilly beans. (Recipe from Food in Jars.) I would have liked for the beans not to have floated, but oh well. Next year, I will definitely make more because Andy and I opened up a jar earlier this month basically inhaled the contents in about 10 minutes. I'm not proud.

Pickled Jalapenos

3 pints. Recipe from Food in Jars. A very simple recipe to preserve jalapenos for chilis, tacos, enchiladas and more all year. We actually don't use that many of these. I just feel bad letting jalapenos go to waste.

Dill Pickle Relish 

7 half pints. Another happy result of the cucumber bumper crop. Recipe from Tasty Kitchen. I did cut the amount of celery seed in the recipe in half because I don't much care for celery seed. It's definitely more like the sweet relish you buy in stores as opposed to store bought dill relish, but it is still darn tasting on a bratwurst. Which is a relief, considering that we have 7 jars of it.

Peach Jam

4 pints. Very basic peach jam, recipe straight from the Sure-Jell package. I love peach jam, but I'm feeling a need to shake things up a little next year and maybe try one of those bourbon vanilla peach jam recipes I see floating around the blogosphere. Funny, I was gifted with a couple jars of peach jam from other canners this summer, so we've got plenty of peach jam for the winter. (We still had some leftover from last year when I made this batch.) Quick, give me all your baking recipes that call for a jar of peach jam!

Raspberry Jam

4 pints. Oh beautiful, lovely raspberry jam. I love raspberry jam and yes, children of the 90s, I would marry it. This is another recipe straight from the Sure-Jell packet and I feel absolutely no desire to attempt to "improve" upon it. Raspberries, sugar, and a bit of pectin are all you need to make me very happy. Every summer I swap blueberries with my mom to get enough of her homegrown raspberries for a batch of jam. And then I don't share it.

Apple Cider Syrup 

6 half pints. I was hoping to find some "real" apple cider this fall so I could try out a batch of Marisa McCellan's Apple Cider Syrup. We made an impromptu trip to the big city last week and I got to stock up on cider. I'm not much of a coffee drinker and my favorite drink at Caribou is actually the Hot Apple Blast. This syrup can be used as a base for a hot apple cider drink - just add water for Hot Apple Blasts all winter long! The syrup is also very good drizzled over ice cream and I imagine would be pretty yummy on waffles or french toast too.


Pear Vanilla Jam 

4 pints. Final canning project of the year until marmalade season next January. Recipe from Food in Jars. It's a lovely gentle jam, which works just fine in a PB&J sandwich. However, I think this jam's true destiny is on the appetizer plate next to some baked brie.

Now all the jars are filled up (whew!) and I get to see back and nosh on the fruits of my labors. It's a very delicious feeling indeed.

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Reaping What You Sew

In a happy twist of timing, our garden produce started to come in just as berry season was ending, so I've been able to work at a slow but steady pace when it comes to putting up this year's harvest. (Thankfully, it appears that the love/hate relationship with zucchinis will hold off for another week or two.) I've spent much of my free time in the last few weeks whipping up batches of jam, chopping and blanching vegetables, and rearranging the freezer to hold our new onslaught of berries and produce. To date, this year's "putting up" has involved:

• 2 gallons of frozen blueberries 
• 1 batch of blueberry butter (8 cups)
• 2 batches of infused blueberry vinegar 
• 1 batch of blueberry pie filling (4 quarts)
• 2 pounds of frozen green beans 
• 1 batch of peach salsa (8 pints)  
• 1 batch of raspberry jam (4 pints) 

And that's just the beginning. The tomatoes are beginning to ripen, in a month+ there will be potatoes to harvest (see below!) and soon, very soon, there will be a big batch of pole beans to content with. Not to mention ubiquitous cucumbers which are currently yielding a never-ending batch of fridge pickles.

It's no secret that I'm a rather large proponent of the homemade lifestyle, but the truth is, I've never put much thought in why I prefer "from scratch" living as opposed to a store-bought lifestyle. I always assumed part of my infinity for DIY in the kitchen was merely an appeal to tradition.

Growing up, my mother feed my brother and me homemade bread, homemade jam, and homemade cookies, etc. If you could make it from scratch, then we weren't buying the store version. While I'm sure when I set off on my own as a young adult, I really did have a choice to leave the homemade lifestyle behind me, but instead I fell right into making things from scratch because, really, it was the only way I knew.

I mean, one simply does not buy a lug of peaches for preserving when they come on sale in August unless the idea that peaches and August preserving are as much a pair as peaches n' cream has been instilled in you at a very early age. 

Ah, look at those pints of peach salsa all lined up. Aren't they pretty? They're the result of about 2.5 hours of peeling, seeding, chopping, boiling, and canning. Whew!

After the marathon session of peach salsa making on Monday, I decided to look at my homemade tendencies from a purely economic viewpoint. (Because, you guys, 2.5 hours is quite a lot of time to invest in something, you know.)

After some rudimentary calculations, not factoring in the worth of my time, I figured out that each jar of salsa had cost me approximately $2.30. Yes, when you figure that the cheapest I can buy a 16 oz. jar of a salsa in town is about $2.99, there are slight savings involved with going the homemade route, but as soon as you factor in the assumed monetary value of my time, the store-bought version suddenly triumphs as the better value. Granted, if I'd had homemade tomatoes on hand (our first red tomatoes are just about ready for picking) and if we're actually capable of growing garlic and onions, the cost of each jar would have dropped drastically, although if I factored in the time I spent growing all of the ingredients . . . you get where I'm going.

So why bother with the homemade lifestyle, other than the fact that I know no other way?

1. Money can't buy you love . . . or homegrown tomatoes. I found this quote on Diane's Crave Cute blog recently, and while technically, I suppose you could buy homegrown tomatoes, nothing quite matches the feeling of transforming something raw and unfinished into something delicious and/or beautiful.
2. Control. I've always had control issues. When it comes to homemade stuff, I have total control over how the finished product turns out, which I love. Don't like an ingredient in a recipe? I don't have to use it. This consequently means that the finished product tastes better to me than the store version.
3. When I make it myself, I can avoid preservatives and other less desirable ingredients in pre-made food products. 
4. Reduce, reuse, recycle. When you buy products from the store, you buy a new jar every time. By canning things myself, I can reuse my Mason jars for years. 
5. It's fun. I was shocked last year when Andy implied that my canning obsession was really just a hobby. "But," I stammered. "I'm just trying to feed us through the winter." That and, well, I just wouldn't spend that much time slaving over a steamy stove top in August if it was satisfying and fun.

In other news, look what we found in the potato patch:

Yep, a real, live potato.

I have a feeling there are more of them down there too. This one got bumped off the root when Andy and I went snooping in the straw for potatoes on Tuesday, so we scrubbed it off and threw it into a pot of lamb stew (probably the most delicious and least economical stew to ever grace the inside of a crockpot.) And let me say, the potato and the stew were both delicious.

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