A little jar o' sunshine

It's been a very, very long time since I've put up some food, but I managed a dozen jars of orange marmalade recently. The task kept shifting further down the to-do list until I realized that the oranges were starting to look a little weary and my lemons were threatening to turn to mush on the counter.

It's nothing fancy, just something from the Ball blue book. Since I live on the edge, though, I roughly doubled the recipe and didn't use quite as much sugar as called for, because I like a tiny little bit of bitter (or sour) with my sweet.

We had a rare day of sunshine and I had to take a photo of a few jars basking in it. The sun has been such a tease in Minnesota, hiding behind clouds in the morning only to pop out in the afternoon and then disappear again. The snow is finally melting, although temperatures are once again below freezing today and dirty bits of ice hang on still.

The weather has not been cooperative for sugaring, that's for sure. I've collected a few measly gallons so far, and half of that—four hard-earned gallons, precisely—fell victim to a 3.5-year-old boy as they sat on the back stoop. I'm sorry, sap, that you were fed to the driveway instead of boiled down to delicious, sticky syrup. The weather forecast looks ideal for collecting sap in the coming week, but since three of the five taps are barely producing, I'm not going to hold my breath.

"Dandylion" cordial using child labor

You see weeds; I see liquor.

My daughter is entranced by "dandylions." She's been providing me with a steady stream of bouquets, which are being plunked into mason jars and placed on the dinner table. It's a good thing, because our beautiful suburban lawn is inhabited by as many plants in the weed category as those in the grass category (though, between you and me and everyone else, my heart is with the LessLawn folks so it doesn't bother me one bit). Dandelions keep this little girl occupied for a very long time.

My helper's always
near-at-hand bucket.

Today I decided to take advantage of the combination of her love of dandelions and her love of helping after seeing a recipe for dandelion cordial. I had a whole (two) lawn(s) full of blooms and half of an enormous bottle of the very same Prairie vodka; it must be fate. My helper grabbed her bucket and tore heads off of dandelions like she'd been doing it all her life. I helped in between taking pictures and calling to the dog to get her to stay in the yard, and the bucket quickly filled with the smell of spring.

Free-range booze.

The blogger who posted the recipe suggests drinking dandelion cordial with tonic water and lemon. I'll let you know in six weeks if this is a good idea, or if I am very upset at sacrificing my lovely vodka for this little adventure.

In other news...

The garden was partly planted with lettuce, spinach, rainbow chard, beets, carrots, and snap peas several weeks ago, and the seedlings are finally, gradually emerging from the ground. I am very eager to get everything else in, and also for Minnesota to decide it would like to get warm and stay warm (and sunny, too, please). I already have a farmer tan going on, at least.

The last canning

This goes down as the last thing I canned this season, though I may pull out my jars at some point during the winter to make some orange marmalade. We have here some Italian prune plums, purchased at the grocery store and hailing from who-knows-where, canned in honey syrup. The recipe comes from Food in Jars.

I bought about 8 pounds of those plums just 'cause they looked awesome and I have somehow obtained a huge quantity of honey from various places. It's one of those things I like to pick up as a souvenir, and then my mom stealthily provided me with a giant jar of it from her friend's neighbor's hives. I didn't notice it until I had bought another big container of honey at the farmer's market. Oh, well. It keeps. I remind myself that they find edible honey in Egyptian tombs. The stuff in my cupboard is fine. Might as well buy more.

I have no idea what I'll do with these lovely plums, though Smitten Kitchen has a contender.

Pickl-ed-It

My Pickl-It jars have allowed me to make non-moldy sauerkraut. Hooray! I used the basic recipe for kraut from the Pickl-It website for one jar, and the other is a beet/cabbage/onion concoction that I found here. I didn't add whey, since the Pickl-It people says it's not needed for this kind of fermentation.

The verdict? The sauerkraut tastes like sauerkraut! The beet stuff is so darn sour it brings tears to my eyes and makes me cough, but the flavor is nice otherwise. Since my favorite way to eat sauerkraut is cooked in the crockpot with pork, onions, bacon, apples, and caraway, it's not practical to use this sauerkraut for that. It took several weeks to get it to this point, and cooking would pretty much make all that nice probiotic stuff obsolete.

It's grrrrrrrrrrrrrrape!

A couple of years ago, one of my friends and I raided the grape vines growing all over the fence she shared with a neighbor. I'm not sure of the variety - maybe Red Swenson - but the jelly I made from these grapes was decent enough. Better than the usual storebought, of course, but maybe a little too sour and definitely not the deep, rich purple we know and love from Welch's.

I was informed that her new neighbors ripped out the grape vines. Panic set in! Then I resolved to find a new source of grapes. Enter Craigslist. Now, if you haven't used Craigslist to source local produce, eggs, meat, and the like, you've been missing out. Almost everything you could possibly want is being advertised on Cragislist.

In this case, I found a very nice gentleman not very far away from me who has multiple varieties of grapes for winemaking, jam/jelly, and eating. Someone swooped in and picked the wine grapes, but there were Bluebell grapes enough to pick about 10 pounds (plus 2 pounds of table grapes) in less than an hour. The scent of the grapes was intoxicating, and sent me right back to my childhood. Our neighbors had a grape arbor covered in concord grapes and we kids would go over and pop them into our mouths at every opportunity.

Those ten pounds of grapes yielded 2 gallons of destemmed fruit to work with. Half of that has been turned into the most delicious grape jam one could possibly consume.

I was introduced to grape jam via a jar from another friend. At first I was reluctant; who wants to eat those skins? But one taste had me hooked.

Using the recipe from the Ball Blue Book, I set to work, and one batch of 7 half-pint jars took about 3 hours from start to finish AND I was wrangling two young children at the same time. Another batch done that evening took even less time.

After what happened with the apricot jam (darn near eating through it in record time), I may just need to turn the other half of the grapes into jam as well, though I might want to do jelly instead to skip the whole "acid from the grapes eating away at my skin and making it itch like crazy" thing.

Canned fruit army

Hear me, o peaches and o pears! Thou are not safe from me! I shall turn you all into an army of perpetually preserved produce.

Yet another thank-you to Amy of Crazy Boy Farm for organizing the second round of bulk buying of the most gorgeous fruit my palate has ever laid into. I bought two boxes of pears and peaches, which weighed about 22 pounds each.

Here are the results of my can-stravaganza, peach-and-pear style:

4 pints, 4 half-pints, 1 quart, and a quart-sized container that is living in my fridge of peach salsa; 8 quarts and 3 pints of sliced peaches (one of which did not seal)

15 quarts of pear halves

I've also got three gallon bags full of sliced peaches in the freezer because I ran out of jars and had a bunch of peaches that needed tending to before they'd get overripe.

Peach salsa
The basic idea came from this recipe. I ended up with enough to fill the equivalent of 10 pints.
16 peaches, peeled, pitted, and chopped
1 red onion, finely chopped
1 large red pepper, finely chopped
The zest and juice of 3 limes
1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped
6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
6 banana peppers, finely chopped (note: please don't wimp out and use these peppers; get yourself some jalapenos)
1 cup white vinegar
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon salt

1. Throw all of the ingredients together in a large pot and bring to a boil for five minutes. Take pot off of the heat and let everything sit another five minutes.
2. Process in sterilized jars.

Gadgets make me happy on the inside.

Ah, kitchen gadgets. I do love you. I don't really go for the unitaskers, but there are some things I can't live without. My microplane for one (zesting has never been zestier). My Kitchen-Aid for another. I'm also fond of my plain ol' wooden lemon reamer, and my possibly-ridiculous-but-nonetheless-awesome ice cream maker.

I found two new loves today: Pickl-It jars, introduced to me by Alyssa and TATTLER reusable canning lids, which can be found at Egg|Plant Urban Farm Supply. Be still, my heart.

For those of you who are local to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Alyssa is gathering orders for a co-op for the Pickl-It jars. We can get a decent discount if we order as a group. I look forward to being able to make sauerkraut that doesn't look like something out of a horror film.

The woman with the canner is after you, vegetables.

Ah, canning season. I love it. I work eight hours at my desk job, come home and get the babies fed and tucked into bed (or, rather, baby - my husband is kind enough to deal with the big girl most nights), and spend four hours in the kitchen, and this is what I call fun.

The Ball Blue Book of Preserving is my go-to recipe book for canned goods. It's a whole $8, but worth a whole lot more.

My first dilly beans, four pints worth. I found some lovely, thin, straight green beans at the farmer's market and jumped on those suckers.

9 quarts and 3 pints of dill pickles. I love the Ball recipe for dill pickles, with its bit of sugar. I added a clove of garlic to each jar in addition to big heads of dill. The cukes I found at the market were also nice and thin. I finally managed to pack pickles well, so there's more pickle than brine in each jar.

Six pints of bread and butter pickles. This time I did not use the incredible amount of onions the recipe calls for (3 small ones instead of 8 small ones) and cut the slices thinner than I did the last time I made pickles, which was two years ago. For some reason (impatience?) I had cut them a half-inch thick, which is quite awkward. Plus, the husband complained, and I am nothing if not accomodating, at least when it comes to the width of pickle slices.

This is what you do with 44 pounds of apricots.

Seven quarts of canned apricots, not well packed.

Nine pints of canned apricots, packed somewhat better.

Seven pints of apricot syrup (one went home with my dad).

 

13 half-pints of apricot jam, 11 that were actually canned; the rest went into the fridge because I ran out of rings.

Several jars of jam have been given away already. It is delicious, and I'd share the recipe but I - *gasp!* - didn't really use one. I tried out Ball's liquid pectin but used a lot less sugar than called for, because I like my jam to taste like fruit, with a bit of tartness. And guess what? It jelled just fine, thankyouverymuch.


I'm happy to report that I used every last bit of those suckers, aside from about 10 lost to spoilage and three (*sob*) batches of fruit leather (using this recipe lost to rain. I was being all smug and green and thought, "Oh, I could HARNESS THE POWER OF THE SUN to dry this fruit leather!" And then it went from sunny to downpour and the fruit leather went into the trash.


For those of you interested in using every last bit of your apricots, I suggest this method:

• Make yourself some jam.
• Start canning fruit. Stop after the quarts because you realize using your new, fancy pressure cooker takes a heck of a lot time than you thought. Put leftover fruit in the fridge, along with the syrup.
• Two days later, when you finally have time and you realize that if you do not can the rest now they will spoil and it will be a huge waste of money and you will not have delicious-tasting apricots to crack open mid-winter, dump the leftover fruit and syrup into the pan to heat while you cut up whatever remains of the non-overripe fruit. Lament that there is any overripe fruit.
• Can pints of fruit, taking only the ones that haven't disintegrated.
• Realize that you could make fruit leather with the overripe stuff. Rejoice that you had overripe fruit.
• Throw the rest of the fruit into the pot with the fruit unworthy of canning. Add some lemon juice. Take out smooshed fruit and blend, getting hot fruit puree all over yourself only twice (out of three times).
• Realize you still have a lot of stuff in that there pot. Decide to make syrup. Throw more sugar in, and some corn syrup for good measure. Blend the rest of it together and can it.
• Sit back smugly. And wonder what the heck you'll do with all this apricot stuff.

A big THANK YOU to Amy at Crazy Boy Farm, who organized this fruit purchase. She's taking orders for peaches, pears, apples, and nectarines, which will be delivered in a couple of weeks. Please contact her if you're in the Twin Cities area and want to order. I'm getting two cases each of peaches and pears. I am crazy. The fruit will be crazy delicious.

Today I earned my PHD.

Callister Farm, located in West Concord, Minnesota, held its second processing class today, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to attend (and equally grateful to have shared the experience with my friend Kate). If my memory serves, there were nine of us plus the Callisters, and each of us slaughtered, dressed, butchered, and packaged a chicken.

I was expecting more blood and guts and gore than what I got, but I'm not complaining. I stood and watched the chickens die, as I felt they were owed that, and although at times it was difficult to see people who were not skilled in slaughter doing the deed - myself included in that group - it was less difficult to watch the life go out of the chickens than I expected. As Kate pointed out before I stepped up to kill my bird, "These are happy chickens. They lived a good life." That was a speech I needed to hear at the time. It was a lot more difficult to dispatch a chicken than I expected; the feathers and skin provide more resistance than I thought they would.

Strangely enough, I thought the plucker was the worst part, with the thumping and speed and random glimpses of feet. But, boy, does it do a good job.

The farm is lovely and Lori Callister did a fantastic job teaching and encouraging us. Her stories and the family's dedication has solidified my desire to avoid mass-produced meat. Treating the birds with respect and care takes a lot of work, and that is something I need to support.

I've heard it said that anyone who eats meat should take part in the slaughtering process at least once to get an appreciation of where their food comes from. I heartily echo this sentiment, and hope the Callisters continue to offer this opportunity to interested individuals. My eyes were opened even further (and I have a chicken for my oven) for 40 bucks.

And if you need further proof that the Callisters treat their animals well, I offer this tidbit: I crouched down and opened my arms to one of the many layers scratching about the yard, saying, "C'mere, chicken," and it came to me and let me pick it up. I challenge you to find THAT at a Gold'n Plump farm.

Planning canning

Last year I decided to fling myself back into canning. A few years ago, I canned some salsa and pickles, but moving into an apartment, and then into a new house, took me off that track. This is what I canned last year, in no particular order:

Bread and butter pickles

Dill pickles (a whole day's work with my friend Amy)

Orange marmalade

Grapefruit marmalade

Grape jelly

Plum jam

Pickled beets

Corn relish

Sweet pickle relish

The corn relish wasn't like I remembered; I have very distinct memories of the corn relish I enjoyed as a child (my mom did a lot of canning back in the day), and this didn't measure up, and didn't get eaten. The orange marmalade was fantastic, but I admit I haven't even tried the grapefruit. I just made that because I had grapefruit that was going to go bad otherwise! I haven't tried the plum jam, either, as I made it for my mom. The grape jelly is fantastic, made out of non-concord grapes stolen from a friend's neighboring then-vacant house. The pickled beets are mostly for me, and I will probably hold off on making more this year since I have a few jars left over. We still have some jars of pickles left, but those will be gone soon, and the sweet pickle relish was gone in a flash. I need to make at least double that amount this year.

I'd like to try some new things this year, like tomato jam. I traded some of my canned goods and received some tomato jam in that exchange, and OH GOODNESS is it good. I'd also like to can fruit, like peaches, pears, and applesauce. We can't get locally grown peaches this far north, but I am going to channel my great-grandma and do what they did way back when and get a case (or more!) while they're in season and can away. My dad tells me that the women of Alma would go down to the train when it came up bringing peaches, and would drag crates back home and can them together.

This year, two other ladies will be joining me for periodic can-stravaganzas to take advantage of our joint efforts and equipment. I will be hugely pregnant during most of the summer, and have volunteered to be the one who does the bulk of the (sitting-down!) prep work. That's actually my favorite part, anyway. I'm not a fan of slaving over hot stoves, even if they're set up outside. We might do some prepwork for freezing together, as well, since some things, like strawberries and green beans, take quite a bit of effort. For now, the lineup includes processing strawberries (for freezing and jamming), cucumber pickles, tomatoes, peaches, pears, and, come fall, applesauce.

My stomach is growling just thinking of it all.