To Market... To Market

... and bring home:  a quarter-bushel of Empire apples, a quarter-bushel of Spartan apples, a quarter-bushel of Roma tomatoes,  10 lbs of red onions, a 1 kg jar of local honey, and some grass-fed skirt steak.

Only two more outdoor Saturdays for our local market.  Then the vendors decrease in number as the market moves indoors.

Southern Ontario had a freak frost during apple blossom time, so apples are twice or more what they were last year and year before.  I paid $15 for my half-bushel of C-grade apples.  I'll sort through to store the best ones for a while.  The others will go into the food dehydrator and canned apple sauce.  I'm eating fresh too while I have them.  But I'll keep a close eye on the "keepers" to bake/dehydrate those that start to go right away.

Honey prices keep escalating.  The jar I bought should nicely supplement my souvenir jars from places we visit (tupelo from Florida,  sourwood from the Great Smokey Mountains,  southwester wild flower from New Mexico).

I bought the tomatoes because I wanted to dehydrate some,  have some on hand for hot sauce (I have very hot peppers fermenting right now), and some to eat fresh.

About a third of the red onions will be dehydrated,  a third used in salsa and relish, and a third used in daily cooking (as long as they last in  my warmish basement storage).

I think I'm nearing "ready for winter".

Fire-Roasted Passata

Passata from its Italian name: passata di pomodoro, when tomatoes have been "passed" through a sieve to remove seeds and lumps.


I bought a bottle of Del Monte passata this summer and really enjoyed its versatility and "closer to fresh" taste. Unadorned in the bottle, it combines well with any kind of pesto to make a sauce for pizza or pasta. It is thicker than tomato juice or canned tomatoes but not as thick as tomato paste.

Most home processing of tomatoes requires a boiling off of tomatoes to thicken their consistency for sauce. I use a method that involves fire-roasting, drainage, and passing through an Italian-type tomato press to remove the liquid.

Equipment: grill (with cover), tongs, large colander, bowl of sufficient size to hold the colander, masher (optional), spoon for scooping, pot or bowl for pulp transfer if you can't set your sieving device next to your draining setup, Italian tomato press (a large food mill would also work but is more effort), container to hold strained pulp.

Tomatoes and their washing: I use Roma tomatoes for all my preserving. I can obtain a bushel at a time from local grocers or the farmers market in my area. A quarter bushel will yield 6 to 8 pints of passata and 2-3 pints of tomato stock -- yield depends on tomato size and dryness (due to the season's weather). Ripe Romas make the best passata. They also roast quickly and pass through your sieving device easily. I wash the tomatoes in cool water to which I've added a tablespoon or two of vinegar. This will kill mold spores and bacteria on the tomatoes in case you have hold any of the steps over night.

Fire-roasting: I do this on a gas grill. It can be done on a charcoal grill as well -- I imagine there would be more "fire flavour" in the result. You can also roast tomatoes in the oven, but it's too hot where I live to do at the time of tomato harvest. I roast the tomatoes under cover until they are lightly browned on both sides or until they soften and begin to bubble a bit. You don't want them so soft that they fall apart as you lift them from the grill.

Draining: Put the tomatoes in a colander over a bowl. You want them to cool before putting them through your sieving device anyway. If properly cooked, they will flatten on themselves and begin to release some of their juice. Stir to promote this; mashing also helps. I let one batch drain while I load my grill with the next batch.

Sieving: Once the roasted tomatoes have reduced in volume by a quarter to a third, spoon into your sieving device or the vessel to transfer the pulp to your sieving device. Your device will take out the seeds and skins (which can be composted) and leave you with an unseasoned puree of sauce consistency.

Don't throw out the juice you drained. It makes a wonderful gazpacho base or canned tomato stock for winter soups.

Processing: Once you've sieved all your tomatoes, measure the puree to determine how many jars you'll need. Prepare them and heat the puree just to boiling. Put a tablespoon of bottled lemon juice in each pint jar (double it for quarts), fill with puree with at least a half inch head space. Process pints for 35 minutes, quarts for 40.

Drying Beets

These dried in less than twelve hours in my electric dehydrator -- do it overnight while the power rates are low here in Ontario!

Wash your beets but leave roots and up to two inches of top intact so they don't bleed as much.
Place larger beets in the first layer in your pot and then place smaller ones on top. Cook until you can easily stick a knife into them. The smaller ones will cook quicker, so take those out first. Douse in cold water and slip the skins off.

Slice the beets horizontally 1/8 inch thick. You might want to cut large beets in half from top to bottom before slicing them. They shrink considerably as they dry, so if you want "chips" you'll want to have whole slices.

Lay them on your drying trays. Mine dried in less than twelve hours at 135 degrees F. I plan to use them for snacking, soups, and crushed for food colouring.

Putting Beets By

On Sunday I bought 10 pounds of beets at the local Farm Boy. Nice medium-sized beets.

That evening I cooked up two 6 qt pots full. One pot went into my electric food dryer (6 trays full!) and the other pot was peeled and sliced for refrigerator storage overnight.

You can see how much less storage dried takes over canned!

This Year's Jazzy Labels

You can make great labels if you have a colour laser printer,  Inkscape, and Broderbund collection of clip art and fonts.  With IrfanView you can even swap colours on things like frames.  With GIMP you can make the "white" in your clip art transparent so you can layer things like pepper pictures on frames.

I print on plain multi-purpose paper.  I use school glue to glue them on to the jars (after they've cooled from water-bath processing).  A little soaking is all it takes to get them after the jars are emptied -- much nicer to deal with than the sticky adhesive on Avery labels or the labels that come with canning jars.

The Thick of Canning Season

The date when I can get bushels of regional Roma tomatoes, sweet red peppers, and peaches from my grocer down the road came early this year, so I'm doing my heavy canning in mid-August rather than the end of it (and sometimes right into the Labor Day weekend).


Friday: 20 pints Zesty Tomato Sauce, 16 pints Tomato Stock, 7 pints Rummed Peaches.

Saturday:  6 quarts Pickled Sweet Peppers, 6 quarts Jardiniere,  began drying peppers, roasted peppers

Sunday:   3 pints and 5 half-pints Roasted Red Pepper Sauce, 7 half pints Peach Salsa, 7 pints Fire-Roasted Passata.  Jarred up 3 pints of dried sweet peppers.

Monday: 9 pints Melba-Brandied Peaches, 5 pints 6-Pepper Hellish Relish, 6 half-pints Bumbleberry Sauce.  Jarred up two more pints of dried sweet peppers and a pint of dried sweet cherries.

The major shelf got filled. 

The Year Of Peppers

Every year there are some things that don't do so well (apple blossoms felled by frost,  squash that didn't produce female blossoms because it was too hot) and other things that do gang-busters.  Like peppers...

I am growing four jalapeno and four red hot pepper plants and they are loaded with peppers.

On Thursday I got a bushel of red shephard peppers -- some years these are skinny in flesh and circumference and length, but not this year!  Almost as fleshy as regular sweet peppers and nearly twice as long.  Wonderful to roast on the barbeque for Roasted Red Pepper Spread -- a dozen of these beauties was enough for a double batch of the stuff.

On Saturday at the Farmers Market, one vendor was offering a bushel of orange and yellow sweet peppers for $10.  How could I resist -- especially in light of my dearth of squash and a winter need for vitamin A.

Oh, I picked up a half-dozen green peppers to go with them at the No Frills at 77 cents a pound....

I dried and canned my way through all but two green and two red peppers 5 days.  I have 5 jars of dried sweet peppers (from 2 to 3 cup in size),  6 quarts of pickled sweet peppers,  4 jars of  sweet and sour yellow pepper soup, and they made substantial contributions to the content of jardiniere and a 6-pepper Hellish Relish.

The Re-Use Earwig Trap

Earwigs love to nest in -- and ruin -- my ripening grapes.  I don't  have as many this year because they bloomed early and frost hit some of the blossom.  I also deeply mulched the grapes this year so I wouldn't have to water them as often. The little earwig traps I bought a couple of years ago would be lost in it.

I've been eating tall tubs of Astro yogurt all summer.  I kept three out of the blue box to make earwig traps.  If they didn't work, I could always toss them back into the blue box.

The trap needs a way for the earwigs to get in,  the impossibility that they can get out again, and a bait to draw them in the first place.  A bait that they drown in keeps them from getting out.  They like beer and liquid detergent with a scent also helps draw them.  The detergent assures a drowning.

I drilled  four or five 1/4" holes in the top inch of yogurt container.  The lids go back on to keep out the rain and bigger vermin. The earwigs will crawl through the holes and drop into the bail solution.  Every few days I can remove lids and empty out dead earwigs and spent bait.

I had some very old near-beer sitting around.  It's the hops and malt that draws the earwigs, not the alcohol, so that was fine to use.  I had picked up a couple of detergent jugs early in the summer with push-spigots on them to replace my older outdoor sink water supplies.  Rinsing them out, I got a fair amount of diluted detergent which I stashed in another tall yogurt container.  I mixed the near-bear, detergent, and water in 64 oz. jug and now have a good month's supply of earwig bait.

I nestled the traps in the mulch under spans of vine that had grapes growing.  I've been removing earwigs every few days since and the grapes still look healthy.

Everything I've used in the traps has been diverted from the waste stream.

Rhubarb After Wine

... when you make rhubarb wine, you have shrunken, lightly sweetened rhubarb pieces left in your strainer.  They could be composted.  I tasted one -- just the right amount of sweetness (most of the sugar used in extracting the juice is in the juice). 

I really like the rhubarb-elderberry flavor combo I'm using in the wine.  I've got some elderberries frozen in the freezer.  The rhubarb chunks and a cup of elderberries went into my 2 quart glass measure (nice deep sides and a handy handle) and into the microwave.  First for three minutes, another three minutes, and then two (microwave wattages vary, so break up cooking times the first time out with something -- you can add more time to cook more, you can't undo overcooking).  The rosy hue of the rhubarb deepened,  a lot of the chunks held their shape with some saucing, and the result tasted divine over sourdough waffles with yogurt on top.  On the weekend away at a potluck breakfast I found it went equally well with yogurt on granola.  People also ate it as a side.  It was universally loved.

On the next batch of wine,  I cooked the sauce on the stove and canned it.

Rhubarb-Elderberry Sauce  (makes 5 half-pints)

6 cups rhubarb chunks (juice extracted via sugar)
1 cup elderberries (frozen is fine)
5 half-pint jars

1. Clean and heat jars as for any canning.
2. Cook the rhubarb and elderberries together.  The sauce is done when remaining juice in the rhubarb and juice from the elderberries combine and make a lightly gelled base for the softened fruit.  It will soften more during processing.
3. Spoon into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace.  Use a knife or spatula to get out air pockets.
4. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.  
5. Remove, cool, check that seals are made, label and store.

If you are making two batches of wine (two gallons) at the same time or a few days apart (store the chunks from the first batch in the refrigerator), you can double the recipe and put it into pint jars.  The water bath processing should then be 20 minutes.

A Rose from Rhubarb?

... wine that is!

Two years I began make a rose (don't know how to do the accent here -- it's pronounced "rose-ay") wine from rhubarb with the addition of black raspberries to colour it that delicate pink and give it a flavour lift as well.  I didn't get to drink any of it the first year because local teenagers explored my basement when we left the back door unlocked and made of with it!  After upping our house security and putting potables under lock and key as a backup, I've got 20 bottles of rose wine to enjoy in coolers, cooking, and straight sipping.

This year I had leftover canned elderberry juice and white grape juice (from my own shrubs and vines), so I've begun using those instead.  The elderberry juice adds the needed colour and both deepen the flavour dimension of the wine.

Equipment you'll need:

• kitchen scale -- you do have to weigh the rhubarb and sugar
• 6 qt stainless steel pot with cover
• a second bowl or pot for the straining step
• 2 quart measure
• fine-mesh strainer
• glass gallon jug  (clean and sterile)
• fermentation lock to fit the jug's mouth

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 - 3 lbs rhubarb
• 2 1/2 lbs white sugar  (this produces a dry wine )
• 1 cup elderberry juice
• 2 cups white grape juice
• 2 quarts filtered water
• 1/2 tsp yeast nutrient (provides elements for the yeast not in the rhubarb)
• 1/2 packet of wine yeast (champagne type is good because it sinks to bottom of your jug)

Steps:

1. Gather rhubarb, wash, slice 1/2" thick.  Put 2 and half pounds of it (or up to three pounds) in the steel pot.
2. Add 2 and half pounds of sugar to the pot.  More sugar will make a sweeter wine, but no more than three pounds is advisable. 
3. Stir the sugar through the rhubarb and cover.
4. Leave for 24 hours,  stirring it every few hours.  The sugar will draw the juice from the rhubarb. 
5. Strain the juice from the rhubarb.
6. Put the rhubarb back into the empty pot,  add two cups of  filteredwater,  stir throroughly and strain again.  Do this twice. You're trying to get all the sugar and juice out.
7. Measure the amount of liquid you now have.  Add the juices.  Top up with more filtered water to make a gallon.  Rhubarb liquid + elderberry juice + white grape juice + filtered water = 1 gallon.
8. Heat to lukewarm.  Add yeast nutrient and yeast.
9. Pour into the gallon jug.  Set up your fermentation lock with some filtered water with a little bit of bleach or sulphite in it -- be careful not to overfill!  Insert the fermentation lock into the jug's mouth.
10. Let ferment 6 weeks in a coolish (less than 72 degrees F. but more than 60) dark place.  If fermentation takes place at more than 75 degrees,  you'll get a "lighter fluid" taste to your wine.
11. Check that fermentation is done:  jiggle the jug and no bubbles should come up through the fermentation lock.
12. Sterlize 5 750 ml bottles  (I use Perrier bottles I collect from household recycle bins in the neighborhood -- the caps are fine for this wine).  Use a tube siphon to tranfer the wine from the jug to the bottles.  You want to leave behind the yeast sediment at the  bottom of the jug. 
13. Cap and label.  Store in a cool, dark place for at least four months.  
14. When using, carefully decant into another bottle to leave behind any yeast that may have settled during the storage period.

Tomorrow:  what to do with the shrunken rhubarb after the juice is extracted