October 2010 Archives

I think it's funny that when I'm in the middle of canning it's almost impossible to prepare actual meals.  I end up eating a lot of sandwiches and easy food.  Back when we had more money it was a great excuse to order in from restaurants.  This week the best thing I ate was this pan of roasted vegetables all of which I got from the two organic farms I buy from.  The tofu isn't organic and came from the regular market. 

I cut up two sweet potatoes, a few small Yukon potatoes, an enormous fennel bulb cut into six wedges, one whole block of tofu, and an entire head of garlic on my roasting pan.  I cut everything into (roughly) 1.5" size pieces.  I sprinkled it with salt and pepper and drizzled a generous amount of olive oil over the whole thing.  I cooked them at 400 degrees, turning them about every ten or fifteen minutes for an hour.

Best meal I've had all week!  I'm not usually a huge fan of fennel but I have to say that eaten this way has changed my mind.  I can no longer remember how I've fixed them in the past.

The best thing I ate the previous week was a pasta sauce I made with chanterelles and caramelized onions added to a sharp white cheddar cheese sauce.  The sauce was so thick it worked well to spread on toast and broil. 

All my other meals have been breakfasts of eggs, cheese, and tomatoes or lunches of cheese tomato sandwiches. 

I did make (and freeze) some tomato soup.  I consulted friends for herb ideas and everyone has something different to suggest.  I ended up using fresh thyme from the garden and the very last of the fresh local basil.  I thought it was really nice but Philip preferred it as a dip for a grilled cheese.  He didn't love it on it's own merit, which is why I didn't bother posting my recipe here.  It needs work.  All soups should be worthy of standing alone. 


I made my annual trip to the local farm Bernard's this year for tomatoes, summer squash, and eggplant - all upick.  I ended up getting some jalapenos even though I promised myself I wouldn't.  Here's what I packed on my scooter:

74 eggplants
3.5 pounds jalapenos
34 pounds green and red tomatoes

All of this food cost only $36.95.  I am not kidding.  The eggplants were 25 cents each, the tomatoes were 47 cents a pound, and the jalapenos were comparatively expensive at 99 cents a pound.

Last year my friend Laurie brought me a box of walnuts she'd collected from her mother's tree.  I put them in the freezer and only just cracked them all open in the last few weeks.  I portioned them into vacuum sealed bags and put them back in the freezer.  Walnuts are expensive to buy and I can go through a lot making this recipe for walnut pesto sauce.


The day I brought home my giant bunch of dill-heads I was so giddy with excitement that I got chatty with the Rite-aid check-out guy who could be expected to have no interest at all in pickles.  To my surprise I was wrong.  I said "Dill!!" and he said "Pickles!" and I spazzed out at him when I found out his grandmother makes cauliflower pickles and it turns out this barely-twenty-something kid is a fan of cooking blogs and home canning. 

Those dill-heads would turn out to be a grim* reminder of the superiority of insects.  For anyone who doesn't know, it is generally best not to wash herbs any time you can get away with it.  I have been pickling for 4 years and have never had any problems with my dill.  I've grown complacent and careless, apparently.  I canned 17 quarts of pickles and every single one of those jars has a few tiny floating pickled aphids in them. 

I thought I was going to have to dump the jars out and cry over a very large beer.  Luckily my husband and my mother are more intrepid eaters than I am and have declared that they are perfectly happy to rinse the pickles before eating. 

I obviously had to make some aphid-free cauliflower pickles for myself.  I got more dill heads, really nice looking ones that didn't seem to have any aphids on them.  But I wasn't going to take any risks so I soaked my fresh dill heads in vinegar for a few hours thinking this might make all the aphids die and let go.  It worked!  (Yes, there were aphids on these ones too.)  But then I made the mistake of taking them out of the vinegar and waiting to use them the next day by which time they had developed a truly suspect odor.

In the end my last 14 quarts of pickles had no dill-heads.  Instead I used a quarter teaspoon of dill seeds and a quarter teaspoon of dried dill leaves.  I have no idea how they will turn out.

I am now done with my preserving season!  I am ready to concentrate on actual cooking, curtain making, and writing. 

I have been doing a lot of preserving in the past month.  It has been my intention for weeks to hang up the jar tongs and get back to seriously writing the second draft of my book.  I have this goal that I will have the second draft finished by January 1, 2011.  Instead of writing I've been making batches of pesto (I'm up to a little over 20 batches in the freezer), canning stewed tomatoes (17 quarts this weekend), making quadruple batches of enchilada sauce to freeze, and yesterday I made an enormous batch of soup using the last of the summer vegetables (corn, green beans, summer squash, tomatoes, new potatoes, and fresh basil).

The elderberries are winding down now.  I've got 11.25 cups of elderberries getting sauced in 2,250 ml of 100 proof vodka in the pantry.  I have at least another 6 pounds of foraged elderberries in the freezer.

I could be done now.   I could throw the towel down and leave the ring.  But if I did that I wouldn't have any dill pickles.  There weren't enough pickling cucumbers for me to make cucumber pickles but right now there are these giant locally grown cauliflowers and cabbages that I can pickle the same way I do the cucumbers.  I made the cauliflower last year and it was an enormous success- not only between myself and my husband but all of our friends who tried them loved them also.   

l love marinated three bean salad, so when I found a canning recipe for it I was really excited to try it.  The only problem was it called for green peppers which I don't care for, and which aren't traditionally found in a three bean salad.  I've noticed that a lot of canning recipes call for green peppers where I wouldn't normally suspect them and I'm sure this is because everyone grows them and then doesn't know what to do with them.  Toss them in the pickle!  Toss them in the sauce!  Put them in the piccalilli!. 

If you ask your local extension service about substitutions in canning recipes you are almost guaranteed to be told: NEVER MAKE SUBSTITUTIONS! and then they'll fall into a dead faint.  They take this subject very seriously, and rightly so.  The danger of making substitutions in a canning recipe is that you  might alter the acidity level of the food which may possibly make it unsafe to can. 

I chose to call my local extension office for advice and I ended up having to talk to the head master canner because the other ones were too scared to answer my question: can I safely replace the bell peppers in this recipe with more of some of the other items such as the green beans?  She looked into it and came back with the answer that it was safe.  She went on to explain that there was no reason other vegetables couldn't be used in this recipe in place of what's already in it, that the kidney beans and the chick peas were the lowest acidity items in the recipe and as long as I don't skip the over night marinating step, I can make substitutions in this recipe.

Why is marinating this recipe for at least twelve hours important?  Because you need to allow the beans, which have the lowest acidity level of all the vegetables in this recipe to become well saturated with the marinating liquid which ensures that the beans are at the proper acidity level.

I'm offering two versions here: Marinated Summer Vegetables and Marinated 3 Bean Salad.  What I love about these recipes is that when it's the middle of winter and there isn't a lot to put on a salad I can drain a jar of these and add half a cup to a bed of lettuce and enjoy summer vegetables in winter.