Preservation

Grape Juice

 

We were blessed enough to be invited to pick grapes at a friend of a friend's backyard vineyard mid-August. He had a wonderful slew of vines, and we came home with a couple bushels of Concord and what I think were Reliance grapes. I can't wait for the day we have a lovely backyard vineyard. We picked wild grapes earlier a couple weeks before, but their yield is just not much compared to these juicy beauties.

 

These are the grapes draining. After I was all finished making juice, and had already tossed the spent skins, pulp, and seeds, my preservation group had a posting that said I could have used all of that to make fruit leather by putting it through my handy-dandy food mill. Something to try next year!

 

We ended up with 8 gallons of grape juice. Grape juice and apple juice are the only things that are safe to can in half gallon jars, and boy does that fact make processing go so much faster. I canned grape juice a couple years ago, but did it all in quarts that time and it makes for a lot of time spent canning. The Concords made a beautiful purple juice, while the Reliance, which were green to pink, made a lovely mauve-y pink juice. All those quarts up there are chicken stock and crushed tomatoes. It was a busy week :)

Crushed Tomatoes

Quart after quart of these beauties keep heading down to our basement pantry. I love preserving our own garden goodies!

Garden Tomato Soup

This stuff is so good. I love tomato soup anyway, but once you make it from scratch, it is so simple! It is also a fast preserve in the pressure canner. I made a batch big enough for 5 families to have three quarts on their shelves in the roaster yesterday and canned it all today. Very good and very good for you! This will make the number of tomato plants we need this coming summer raise substantially. I will be eating this for lunch a lot...I used to buy the little drinkable tomato soup cups from Campbell's when I was in college and would have them for lunch with a veggie burger each day in the commuter lounge. This would be easy to make just as accessible by canning it in half-pint portions. You pop the lid off and you can totally reheat in the microwave. Here's what I did: 

In a stock pot combine (or you can do this in a crockpot all day, if that is easier):
8 cups roughly chopped or canned diced/crushed tomatoes, with juices
1 large onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, thin sliced
2 stalks celery, sliced
1 c summer squash, sliced
6 c meat stock
1/2 t fresh ground pepper
1 T dried basil
salt to taste (it will need some, at least)
Simmer until all your veggies are soft, then blend or puree it to make it smooth. Right before serving add a T or so of heavy cream to the bowl of soup for a creamier version.

To can this, prepare your jars, lids and rings, then fill. Process 25 minutes at 10 pounds pressure for pints and 30 minutes at 10 pounds pressure for quarts.

The croutons are simply grilled cheese sandwiches (For my personal croutons, I use the gluten free boule recipe from Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, which worked out okay, but is pretty dense. Looking for other make at home options.)I cut into crouton size. Toast in the oven when you're ready to eat them, until they crisp up a little.

This post is also in conjunction with A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa's Simple Lives Thursday Blog Hop. Check it out!

Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce

Though there have been no gluts of tomatoes this year, the plants we did get in are doing very well. I canned a bit of diced tomatoes to use for salsa throughout the winter, as we do not like canned salsa. The other big thing we use is sauce for pizza and pasta. I do not like just pureeing tomatoes and trying to get them cooked down and thickened up at the last minute-usually we have pizza or pasta when we are running short on time, so I needed a grab and go sauce. I found a recipe for an oven roasted sauce, and tweaked it a bit to our taste. It turned out beautifully and was very simple.

First, cut up enough tomatoes to generously fill a 9X13 or standard sized rectangular casserole dish. Put some olive oil in the bottom before you toss them in to help them from sticking and add flavor. I used about 1/4 c.  I kept the tomatoes in quarters-anything smaller and it can get very tedious to pick out the skins later. Then I quartered one onion and broke up the cloves of one large head of garlic, though I DID NOT skin them and put all of that on top. I also had a couple sweet peppers in there somewhere just chopped a bit.
Put all of this in a 450 degree oven for 45 minutes, then turn it down to 350 for another hour to two hours. Just watch everything roast. Once the tomatoes are sufficiently cooked down (their insides should squish well and the skins just fall off) and your garlic squeezes right out of the skins, you are done cooking.

Let everything rest on the counter until it cools enough you can handle it. It may take a while. Just cover it up and do something else. Once it is cool, start moving the veggies to a food processor-it took a couple batches to get everything done. Squeeze the garlic out of its skins and remove all the tomatoes skins you find. All those skins will make your sauce bitter. Once you have pureed everything to a sauce, including all the juices in the bottom of the pan, mix your batches together and season with salt, pepper, oregano, basil and sugar to your taste. Fill jars and process for 35 minutes (quarts) at 10 pounds pressure in your pressure canner.

Pickle Making with Dawn

My friend, Dawn, has been inundated with cucumbers this year and in her search for a good pickle recipe, came over to my place to get some help. I am still searching for the perfect one, myself, but have several that work for now. I don't intend to stop looking, though, until we've found one everyone loves. It won't happen this year. My cukes are doing wonderfully, and are supposed to be specifically for pickling, but I am finding they do not hold up well to standard pickling processes. We are going to try a refrigerator pickle next and see if it is the heat that is making them limp. In the meantime, I still love practicing!

This post is part of Simple Lives Thursday hosted by Diana at A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa

Bountiful

Soda Syrups

Due to just being around people in general, soda pop made its way into our house. For years I have been battling to get it back out. Rather than throw my hands up in despair while my husband and children begged for it (mostly just on the days they were terribly bored with iced tea or the occasional juice), I figured out a substitute. I hate to see anything thrown out, and I love creative uses of anything else. This led to soda syrups, which we use with sparkling water in a ratio of roughly 3 to 1. These syrups impart more than enough flavor to a drink, and yet are far, far, FAR less sugar (even if they are still a syrup!) than a normal soda, and have none of that "other stuff". I have been using whatever I have left over from canning other preserves, plus the wonderful fruit finds from our local grocery store and markets-ours has a big cart it tosses "going to spoil soon" fruit in for pennies on the dollar. These mixes of fruit (right now mostly stone fruit) make wonderful syrups. We have also been making herbal and foraged syrups. What follows is my basic recipes. These are fabulous added to iced teas in place of sugar, as well. They could be made with honey, but my pocket book prefers I stay away from that until we have our own source. I include the lemon juice in all the recipes because I do not know the specific varieties of some of these fruits, or their precise age and it is my safety net. Plus, lemon is good with any fruit :)

Basic fruit syrup:
Clean, pit/seed and chop up your fruit-whatever kinds. You can mix and match or do all the same.
Put them in a pot with a little water to keep them from scorching while you cook them down. I cook mine around 15-20 minutes, and mash them while while cooking to release as much juice as possible.
Once it looks like they are sufficiently mushy and pulpy, strain the entire mixture into a separate pan, like you would for jelly or cheese (I use a plain, white cotton dish towel and hang it from my cabinets over a bowl). Let it drip until it drips no more. Do not squeeze, unless you want cloudy syrup-which isn't a really big deal. It tastes the same, but you may end up with little pieces of pulp in your glass, too.
Measure out how much juice you have into a stock pot, and add the same amount of sugar-this is a syrup, folks! Bring the whole thing up to a boil and boil just long enough for the sugar to fully dissolve and incorporate. Add 1/4 c lemon juice per batch of syrup.
Fill your sterilized canning jars (you could easily keep this in quarts, though we use pints and half pints as I like to change up my flavors a lot), clean the rims, top with sterilized lids, and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.
We have used grapes, peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, strawberries and canteloupe in all sorts of concoctions for this this summer, and I have a watermelon waiting to become watermelon and watermelon mint soon.

For an herbal syrup (our fave right now is chocolate mint, we are making an almond flavored one from peach leaves today): Take two cups of fresh picked leaves, tear and bruise them, and add two cups of water.
Place in a pan and boil your leaves to basically make a tea-5-10 minutes depending on how strong you want it. Taste it!
Strain out the leaves and add 2 cups of sugar to the liquid. Boil this until the sugar fully incorporates.
Follow the canning instructions above.

These are great in coffee, as well. There are wonderful posts around the net on using foraged items like elderflower and Queen Anne's Lace (just omit the pectin recommended here to make it a syrup) in syrups, as well.

My Favorite New Toy

I love my new pressure canner. I have canned green beans, summer squash, okra and meat stocks like mad here lately, freeing up freezer room. I also have used it to make dinner in a jif-a stew that usually takes hours took 20 minutes and was delish and tender. I am considering getting a smaller model to use specifically for dinner purposes. It definitely makes using tougher cuts of meat easier as they are sooo tender when cooked in one of these puppies. Worth every penny!

This post is part of Simple Lives Thursday, hosted by A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa!


Also (accidentally, but so nevertheless, hee hee) part of Two For Tuesdays

Peach Salsa

Peaches are, by far, one of my favorite fruits to preserve. I mean, I really love canning most fruits, but the things I can do with a peach-wow. One of my most requested recipes right now (and by far one of my favorites) is my peach salsa. I am planning on buying another load of peaches to make more salsa, jam and syrup next week, but took a week off this week to do some pressure canning of summer squash and beans. In the meantime, this is how I make my salsa-I love simple. I have seen other recipes that include extra spices or veggies that just take away from the simple, stunning flavor of this salsa.
Enjoy!

Peach Salsa
6 c pitted peaches, diced
1 1/4 c diced onion
4 jalapeno peppers, diced (seed these if you don't want it too spicy. I personally like only a little edge)
1 bell pepper, preferably red, diced and seeded (though an color will suffice)
1/2 c chopped fresh cilantro or 1/4 c dried
3/4 c white vinegar
2 T honey

Combine all and mix thoroughly. Raw pack into cleaned, sterilized jars and hot water bath for 20 minutes (more if you are too far above sea level).

 This post is part of Simple Lives Thursday with A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa!

How I Spent My Day

Lots of green beans means preserving in our house. I got out the pressure canner my Grandma had given me, got everything rolling, only to find out the gauge was broken. So quickly, I made one recipe's worth of Spicy Pickled Beans (which, if we like, you will see here later. Because it is technically a pickle, I can just hot water bath it) and froze the rest. Most of the fam likes their beans cooked with massive amounts of bacon, butter, salt, garlic and onion, so canning is the way to go. Thinking after the cost of the parts I need for the canner, I am most likely going to end up just buying a new (also more modern) one.

Putting By

So where in the world is Carmen SanDie..

..err, Momma?
Still here. Papa H is still in the hospital. We are currently looking at moving him to assisted care until he completes from rehab from his illness and rib injuries.
In the meantime, I run to the hospital frequently, while still trying to maintain some sort of sanity at the house, and run a business. Fu-un.
We are doing well, though. The kids and I have had an awesome week that has involved new haircut and color for me (I needed some help de-frumpifying. Thanks to Jen at Sahar's Jordan Creek Salon), friends galore as we made the farm drop off on Thursday we got to play with Wally and Sarah, Friday we made jam, and Pony Gal and a friend got covered with mud from head to toe exploring the world of a chicken while we moms watched on and talked (and talked, and talked), and today I had a mini workshop for farm members on baby food. Only one member showed up, but Jen, I totally enjoyed the morning! We talked quite a lot and she got to see the farm for the first time. I hope I didn't yammer too much.
I wasn't sure how I would conduct the workshop, but was pretty laid back since it was only her and me. I tend to drift back and forth when I get on the subject of food and nutrition. I am passionate about it. I love to talk about it. I know a lot about it. It sometimes makes me hard to follow, I think, but I just want to let people know what I know so they can improve their situations. As I have mentioned before, even if I weren't paid to do this, I think I still would, because I can make a positive impact on others' lives. Plus, seeing two adorable little girls in mud puddles while chatting with iced teas in hand makes anything worth doing. Or knowing that a family is eating super healthy and that possibly you are aiding in a child avoiding serious illness as an adult simply through mom and dad insisting on whole, chemical free foods instead of falling prey to convenience and packaging.
I also enjoyed the jam making as I got to spend a little time with my mother in law who came out to aid. She had never made jam or canned much so was excited at the invitation, and a wonderful helper. I used to do it all the time, but it gets difficult to do when there are kids involved. Timing is very important in food storage, and when you have to run here or there to aid or feed, then you run the risk of ruining the whole shebang.
Anyhow, doing well. Someday I will post pictures.