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".

There's A Hole In the Bucket...

... actually it's a whole set of cracks, the handle-holding spot broke, and so I spilled my gathered produce as I dodged the ladder set by my back gate...

The bucket is plastic, of course, and it's been out in the sun and weather for more than a few seasons.  It originally held muffin batter, I think (the label is all worn off).

Anyway, the old bucket went into our plastic recycling -- and I picked up four much newer buckets of a similar size on the neighborhood boulevard.  They have metal bails and originally held drywall compound -- much sturdier!

I also brought home three glass jars for hold dried foods,  a former olive oil bottle whose dark green glass will perfectly hold a Christmas gift of fermented hot pepper sauce,  a Windex spray bottle, a 2.5 gallon water jug (it has a spout that comes off) for emergency water storage,  a gallon metal tin, and a shoebox sized filing box (with label holder).

I'm all for reuse over recycling!

Tomato Stock

This is a pantry basic for me. I fire-roast my tomatoes and drain off liquid (see my post on passata) from them to make it. It certainly cuts down the boiling-down time to produce tomato sauce! I usually produce 1 pint of tomato stock for every 2 pints of tomato sauce (this is still some boiling down) I put up.

You can refrigerate the drained liquid for several days if you're accumlating it from several small batches of sauce making.

Recipe for Tomato Stock

12 cups of drained tomato liquid
2-3 cloves of garlic
1/2 c fresh basil
1 small onion, cut up
1-2 stalks of celery, cut up
1/2 c parsley
other herbs to taste: tarragon, hot pepper, oregano
Bottled lemon juice or citric acid for jars

Put 1 cup of the liquid in the blender. Add the seasoning ingredients. Puree.

Put the rest of the liquid into a pot. Add the seasoning puree. Salt to taste. Prepare your jars as you heat the stock to boiling; you can simmer it for 5 to 10 to develop flavours for your tasting and adjusting.

For each pint jar, use one tablespoon of lemon juice or 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid for acidification (double amount for quart jars). Pour stock into jars, seal, and process 35 minutes for pints, 40 minutes for quarts.

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.

Orangey Canned Beets

I bought beets because I want them for winter. I also wanted them with an orangey flavour. This was going to be easy to do because I have dried orange peel and some orange oil. I thought caraway would be nice too and I threw in some green peppercorns for a bit of a bit.



Recipe for Orangey Canned Beets

8 cups cooked, peeled, sliced beets
3 cups white vinegar
2/3 c water
1/2 c organic sugar (more if you really have a sweet tooth)
1 tablespoon dried orange peel
2 tablespoons caraway seeds
2 teaspoons green peppercorns
a few drops of orange oil if you have (to taste)

Put your peel, caraway and peppercorns in a large tea ball or a cheese cloth bag. Place in pot with the vinegar, water, and sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes (prepare your jars while doing this). Add orange oil to taste if using.

Take out the spices and add the beets to the vinegar brew. Bring to a boil. Put in jars, leaving at least 1/2 inch headspace once topped up with brew. For pints, process 30 minutes. I had quarts, so I processed 35.

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!

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. 

Preserving Food Without Heating the House

Well, 20 mm of rain in the rain gauge this morning, but no real break in the heat -- and it's supposed to be hot all through the week (with possibly more rain on Thursday). The rain barrels are full again -- it's how I've been keeping my kitchen garden (lettuce, tomatoes, basil, cukes, celery leaf, broccoli) going.

I've be religiously watering the main garden on the odd dates of the week (we can water only every other day) with city water. So with the heat I've been getting harvests: green beans, snap peas, black raspberries, greens, herbs. How to keep up with preserving it without superheating the house?

I had a couple of cool mornings with a good cross breeze so I did do some canning early in the morning (all done by 8 am!). Two batches each morning with 10 or 15 minute boil times; and I could use the preheated water to heat the jars for the second batch. One morning I canned pineapple and fruit salad; the second morning I canned black raspberry syrup and black raspberry butter.

The clear, hot days are a boon for the solar dehydrator: basil, oregano, garlic chives, yarrow, lavender, soup greens, celery leaves. I've been converting all my leftover fruit spreads (chiefly bumbleberry: mixed berries with rhubarb pulp) to fruit leather.

I froze some snap peas for stir fries while my second planting gets going and refrigerator pickled a quart of them. The excess green beans went into a fermentation pickle jar this morning. I froze some excess black raspberries (along with other berries just starting to come along: yellow strawberries, ground huckleberries, and red raspberries) for future bumbleberry spread (and possibly future fruit leather). One jar of black raspberry vinegar is steeping now and I just started a jar of blackberry liquor.

Week Two: Eating Down the Pantry

We finished sorting out the pantry: consolidated food items from the metal shelves to the wooden shelves (which, of course, had more space because of the clean-out last week), got rid of a few things, and stored like with like so things are easier to find. The double row of plastic storage has been reduced to one; a container of cloth went to its more appropriate place in the sewing/art room.

Food eaten:

• remainder of lentil soup
• began eating venison summer sausage
• one frozen portion of lasagna
• pizza with homemade sauce (tomato & roasted red pepper) and crust, venison sausage, mushrooms, peppers, cheese
• shepherd's pie: grass-fed beef burger, stored potatoes and carrots, frozen peas, canned cream corn
• homemade artisan bread
• vegetable soup with stored squash, home-canned tomato stock and veg stock, dried greens, dried zucchini, dried red peppers, quinoa, home-made hot sauce
  
• home-canned stew with frozen peas

There was a great $1 sale at one of our local food stores, so a few items that we like to keep a stock of were bought: canned tuna and salmon, canned corn, macaroni, bread and wieners for the freezer. Another store had my favorite yogurt on special, so I bought 3 containers of that. I can make my own, but it's not as yummy. We also got more frozen fish to last us through the winter. Of course the new stuff has been stored "behind" the older stuff. With the other usual dairy and fresh produce, total spent: $35.91

Week One: Eating Down the Pantry

My husband and I went through the bank of shelves in the pantry that is four feet high and eight feet wide. He moved stuff out to the kitchen table one shelf at a time and cleaned the shelf while I sorted. It took us a couple of hours but such satisfaction when it was done!

I was surprised how little there was that had to go: a couple of items past their expiry dates and a couple of pest-infested containers. I moved all of the pasta out of bags and boxes to sturdier glass, heavy-duty plastic, and metal containers. We've not seen any mice in the pantry this year (though a couple died in our trap under the kitchen sink), but this should protect some stuff that was pretty vulnerable otherwise. I consolidated a few packages of things. I also wrote on the kitchen white board things that are a priority to use up.

Food this week that used up some things:

• lasagna: I had the cook-before-use lasagna noodles so I made a big lasagna with tofu, cheese, grass-fed beef, dried veg, and -- of course-- three pints of homemade tomato sauce. We had two meals of it this week and one lunch for me; two containers for two more meals went in the freezer.
• corn-tomato soup: I had two lunches out of this using a corn chowder mix I had on hand with some left-over stewed tomatoes
• lentil soup: I had some mix I bagged up a couple of Christmases ago as well as some dry sausage and more dried veg. With this years tomato stock we got a very hearty and nourishing soup out of it. We have one more evening meal and couple of lunches left.

Groceries actually purchased this week: milk, half-and-half (I use it in making yogurt), organic mushrooms, red and green peppers, zucchini. Total spent: $11.53 The milk and mushrooms should last us two weeks.

Putting the Freezer in Order

I meant to do this early in the summer before I bought more beef, more chicken, more shrimp ... well, you get the idea. Now harvest is burgeoning and I knew there were some older things I want to move out of the freezer to make room for some of this year's stuff.

It's a small freezer but I filled three coolers with its contents after I unplugged it. I would have had to get out another cooler but last summer's rhubarb and strawberries went upstairs to go into rhubarb-strawberry sauce I'm canning tonight. Some of this year's rhubarb went up too. One package of shrimp and the last package of last summer's blueberries went to the refrigerator's freezer (I wanted to make room for two quarts of this summer's wild blueberries!).

I half filled a pail with hot water, put it in the freezer, and closed the lid. I went upstairs to type in the inventory I had made into a spreadsheet. An hour later all the frost had fallen from the sides. I scooped it out (one large piece I carried outside and it landed with a satisfying thunk on the walkway in a dozen pieces or so) and washed everything down. Then I played around with storage containers in the bottom of the freezer for holding smaller things.

The freezer still ended up being pretty full, but it's organized now and I have a list of its contents posted in the kitchen!

The Massive Diabetes Association Donation

I should have taken a picture: two stuffed boxes and four garbage bags that filled the bench on our porch. All gone now, taken by the Canadian Diabetes Association, who will sell it to Value Village, who will sell it to thrifty shoppers.

One bag was clothes and cloth. Another was a bread maker: I do no-knead artisan bread all the time now and I can store the pot I use for it where the bread maker used to be. The third bag contained a rice cooker: it did the rice nice enough, but it was horrible to clean the cover and my thermal cooker does a nicer job with far less mess and a lot less energy too; I'm storing a classic cast iron Dutch oven that I just purchased at a yard sale in that space. The fourth bag was a big plastic grater/strainer thing that I never used. I'll appreciate having the storage space back, probably for food stock-up (beans that I can cook in the Dutch oven in our fire pit if the Catastrophe comes).

One box I started several months ago with a few items that never gotten taken when offered on Freecycle. I kept adding more things as I came across them this spring: travel Scrabble which we never use, a cream whipper which uses gas cartridges (my manual egg beater works just fine for small amounts of cream), an expandable plastic water carrier, and other things I don't remember because that's how important they were to me!

The last box had a wicker wine rack we never used, a light we never used, and some books I'd not yet taken in to the library for their semi-annual book sales.

The "Root Cellar" Box

I have a cold room behind the kitchen. When the cold weather arrives, we seal it off -- completely -- from the rest of the house. I stuck a thermometer in there this year. It read 40 deg F or lower while the kitchen on the other side of the wall read 65 deg F. It's colder because it has horrible windows (double panes of bare, bulky glass which will make great cold frame covers when we replace the windows next year -- they slide in wooden grooves and are quite drafty) and not much insulation anywhere. The wall between it and the kitchen is insulated and we've created a barrier + door in the 4 foot wide opening between the two.

Our basement is small and the presence of the gas furnace down there keeps it too warm to keep many root cellar crops for long. Squash does well. There's a corner where I can put a bucket of apples. But potatoes, onions, and carrots invariably sprout.

I had a large plastic box with an attached deep lid, left over Reflectix from the door, and left over insulation from the attic. I constructed a false floor in the box and stuffed it with insulation. More insulation went in the lid and sides and was covered with the Reflectix. I placed the finished box towards the kitchen wall side of the room.

I put in onions, red onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, mandarins and grapefruit in mid-December. The last of the mandarins were used (and still in excellent shape) the last week of January. We went away the first two weeks of February, turning down the heat in the house to 60 deg F. When we came back, the carrots were frozen -- they were in plastic and in the section of the box furthest from the wall. But sweet potatoes in plastic in the middle of the box were moldy (they went to the compost). The rest of the produce was fine. A key point coming out of this is to not store items in plastic. Those in cloth or heavy paper bags were fine.

We'll see how things go the rest of February.

Early Morning Decluttering

In the last few weeks I've been waking shortly after 6 am and, rather than "sleep in", I've been getting up and spending an hour or so decluttering various spots in the house:

• the bookcase in the bedroom - got rid of 8 books
  
• the bookcase at the head of the stairs - got rid of a dozen books
  
• the stack of books beside my bed -- I now had space for 2/3 of the books in the above two bookcases
• the bookcase in the back storage room - more than twenty books and I rearranged books to have one shelf free for other storage; also got rid of a lot of extra travel mugs that have been superceded by "better" models (much less plastic)
  
• the rest of the back room - got rid of a travel iron, a crate of Mardi Gras beads, a box a tent shelter came in, a wooden display rack, moved and went through a desk pull-drawer set
• the cellar - got rid of a waffle iron, rice cooker, and tea kettle
• the main attic - took out a lot of scrap wood stored up there and barn boards when we beefed up the insulation; also found a folding desk that we removed all the hardware from
• upstairs bathroom - got rid of a lot of travel size products, some samples, and some things I never use

None of the stuff I listed ended up in the land fill. I Freecycled much it, donated some to an alternate library, and some stuff to the Diabetes Society. The lumber all went into shed storage for spring and summer projects. A lot of people were very happy to take the stuff we had around gathering dust.

It's a great way to start the day.

Heatless preserving

... at least heatless for the house!

Obviously, solar drying is a great way to preserve food without using a stove. I find it works great for greens, herbs, flowers and zucchini slices. It works wonderfully to finish off granola when you've toasted all the ingredients separately in a stir-fry pan. I've done melba toast and pita "crackers" in it too.

Steeping liquors and vinegars requires no heat too. Easy recipe: put the fruit in the jar. Add sugar and vodka for a liquor (layering the sugar with the fruit, then covering with vodka. Add vinegar for a fruit vinegar. I made black raspberry vinegar and a tarragon-based (with a few auxillary herbs) vinegar and I use both in salad dressing.

Last year and this I made a lightly salted green vegetable stock. Either put through a food grinder or food processor: 1 part leek, 1 part celery, 1 part parsley (which can be varied a bit with a little bit of thyme and oregano). Salt just so you can taste the salt and pack in jars. This stores nicely in a cool dark place.

When the Sunday before my trip way turned into a hot, humid day and I was faced with nine cucumbers, I knew it was time to try lacto-fermentation. I sliced the cucumbers very thin (about 1/8 of inch or less), sprinkled them lightly with salt and layered them in canning jars. They're down in the cellar and I won't know how they'll come out for a few weeks.

I had a basket of ripe peaches as well. I skinned them, sliced them, layered them in jars with some sugar and filled the jars with brandy. Once a week I'll have to shake them to get the sugar dissolved. Over the winter I should have some yummy brandied peaches and a peach brandy liquor.

For next summer, I'm going to be sure I have some gallon jars on hand to use as "crocks" for lacto-fermented beans as well as cucumbers. With a crock you can layer the stuff in as you harvest it. Talk about convenience!

The Great Cellar Refurb, Part 1

The cellar is small in width, depth, and height (even I at 5' 1" can bang my head on duct work). Strictly speaking it is a tall crawl space. But we have our laundry, freezer, water heater, furnace and storage down there.

In the spring we put in a hanging grow light over a fold-up camping table. Later I built a much shorter table so that we could use a gravity-fed waterer for the plants on it. I got longer chains for the grow light. When we're not growing things on it, it will be a platform for winter storage of vegetables that I built stackable bins for. Now we just needed a unit to put the water on.

Just a week or so ago, a neighbor put out a disassembled shelving unit on the boulevard. It was actually sawed off a hutch unit, but it was all wood. I reassembled it with an additional shelf, all spaced to hold canning jars. I painted the whole thing blue with acrylic enamel we had on hand. My husband found another shelf unit while sorting through our main floor storage room. I put two more shelves in it with everything spaced to hold canning jars. I painted that blue too.

Then we had to rearrange what storage we did have for home preserves to fit the units in. The metal shelf unit by the stairs came out. In its place went the unit from the neighbor. I commenced to moved all of the older preserves into it and put the two kettles I use for water bath processing on the top shelf; they're very handy to get at from the stairs. That freed up space on the bigger shelves along another wall for things that had been on the metal shelf unit, though an old enamel processor went to Freecyle.

We moved the top shelf of the metal unit down and put the unit between the stairs and the grow light table. The gravity fed waterer went on the moved top shelf. Other planting things will go on the other shelves.

The main unit I had built two years ago for home preserves had a decided lean to it. I took everything off, placing it either on top of the washer and dryer or in our wheeled laundry bin. I determined that the lean was due to the lay of the floor (it is rough cement). Rather than having it against the wall, I turned it 90 degrees and found a spot where it was horizontally level. If I put in a board brace to move its top away from the wall (which was not vertically level), then it would be vertically level as well as more stable. My husband found a piece of old paneling in our storage room that just fit the back of the unit. Jars won't fall out and that stabilizes the unit more too. The second new unit went across the end of the older unit to form a T. Everything is accessible.

I sorted the remaining preserves into older and this season's . The older preserves and empty jars went into the second new unit. This season's preserves went into the older unit. Now I don't have to search for the older stuff and I have plenty of empty space for new preserves.

Part 2 will be the wall shelves and the double bank of shelves on the other side of the stairs!

Canned Goods Inventory

Thinking about jam made me think about all the stuff I still have on my canning shelves. I have three sets of shelves I use: one upstairs for frequently used stuff to cut down on trips down the cellar, a unit I specially built to hold pints, and one shelf off a larger storage unit that is good for quarts, but that I also use for pints and half-pints stacked double.

I set up another spreadsheet in my canning log workbook to the 2009 inventory. I used last year's inventory plus new items from last summer's canning log to start this year's inventory. I record the date, name, number of jars made, and jar size in the canning log. I drop the date for the inventory.

I found items I never entered in the canning log. I found some items whose quantity had not changed from the last inventory -- those are things I won't put up this year and that will have to be consumed.

I was surprised to find that I've started canning nearly six weeks before I began last year. The rhubarb is doing really well this year! It did really well last year -- I still have 18 pints of rhubarb sauce (I was putting up a batch nearly every week until September).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still have 6 pints of tomato stock left. That should just do me for the occasional soup until the new crop comes in. Much as I love roasted red pepper spread, I doubt that I'll buy red peppers especially for it this year -- I still have 8 jars and the makings for another six on my canning shelf.

I should make borscht, I should make spring rolls, I should make more pasta, I should eat more pickles. I don't need to buy condiments of any sort this summer. I could have veggie burgers for lunch every day all summer long and probably not run out of relishes, mustard, and ketchup. I've got plenty of fruit to last me until the local crops (including some berries of my own) come in.

I've got 90 quarts of food stashed in 231 jars in my cupboard! Almost fifty different things. (I really practice my belief that variety is the spice of life.)

I made the 12 columns after the inventory small so I could border them and have a list with boxes to check off as I use or begin to use (then stashing in the fridge) them. Some items I had to end extra boxes to by hand, but not many. It's posted on the fridge beside the freezer inventory.

Hey, it's lunchtime!