Continuing Harvest

54°f/about 12°C, clear.

Yesterday we did a bit of a garden cleanout, picking most of what's left of the summer vegetables---limas, peppers, tomatillos, a few tomatoes,  butternut, yellow and zucchini squashed, a bit of broccoli. I sadly pulled the cucumber vines from their arbor, but left one that had a couple hopeful blooms; the rest of the plants were dead. 

These are the 5-gallon buckets we came out of the garden with. My pockets and hands were full too, with flowers, lettuce, green onions, and cherry tomatoes for a lunchtime salad.

It took a while to sort out those buckets! Then to decide what to do with it all. The butternuts went into a basket; i will wipe them down tomorrow with a weak bleach solution and store them in the back room because they require cool, dry storage. The cellar is too damp for them. The zucchinis went into the fridge, to be ground up and frozen to use as filler in soups and stews, and for zucchini bread. The overripe yellow squash and cucumbers were chopped up and given to the chickens, and the rabbits got broccoli that had bolted. 

I cooked up the young yellow squash, drained it and mashed it, then seasoned with butter, salt and pepper and bagged up for the freezer. It makes a nice substitute for mashed potatoes, and so handy to have it frozen. 

When that was done I sat down and shelled the dry limas, spread them on a tray and put them into the oven to finish drying over the pilot light. I will shell the green ones tomorrow and freeze them. The limas germinated very badly; only about 10 seeds came up, but boy did they produce!

Yesterday I tackled the peppers and tomatillos,  making a green salsa. I've never made this before but it came out very well. It will be good mixed into soup beans and chili, or just eaten with tortilla chips. This is the first time I have grown tomatillos in probably 40 years. Such interesting fruit, the way they are covered with a husk. I used to grow ground cherries and garden huckleberries back in the 70s when I was enthusiastically growing everything I could find, from cotton to broom corn and even peanuts once. The ground cherries and huckleberries both had husks too, so I suppose must be in the same plant family---and all are related to tomatoes. If you are interested,  I found the recipe here.

While working on the salsa I put together a white bean chili, using fajita chicken I had in the freezer. It was absolutely delicious! We had it for lunch, and I canned the rest, along with a couple jars of pinto beans and the chicken broth I made the other day. So both the waterbath canner and the pressure canner were on the stove.  By the way, the recipe for the white bean chili is on this website. I highly recommend it! I used dry beans instead of canned, soaking and cooking them first. And I used my canned jalapeños and a bit of my hot sauce to get just the flavor I was looking for.

It was a challenge to find enough jars for all this! I cleaned a couple of odds and ends out of the fridge, then moved some dried herbs from canning jars into other jars I had kept just in case. So I finally found enough, with a few left over. This, I think, is pretty much the last of the this year's garden canning. All that's left are a few tomatoes, and the fall greens. 

I will need jars in November, though, when we make apple butter, so I may have to buy those, unless my sons bring enough for us all.

Now to do the garden cleanup, not an enjoyable job but needs to be done. And then? Start planning from next year! 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Egg Recipes

70°f/about 22°C, light clouds.

A few weeks ago I bought this thing called Egglets at Goodwill. A friend had told about how awesome it was for making perfect hard-boiled eggs,  even from fresh eggs--which, as you know, do not come out of the shell nicely until they are at least a week old. The Egglets thing was all plastic,  and I don't like plastic, but I thought I'd give it a try.

This morning I opened the package up. Apparently whoever had it before had never used it, and after reading the instructions I understood why. You have to coat each part of the two-part cups evenly with oil, either spraying or rubbing it around with your fingers. Then you crack your egg into the bottom cup very carefully, not overfilling it, then boil for about 8 minutes. Which is twice as long as I boil eggs for soft-boiled. There were more instructions,  but i was done. Way too much trouble for me! And if you dont get the oul coating just right, your egg sticks. Then there are all those parts to be washed. Nope. Not for me.

But there was a nice little recipe book enclosed, so I took photos of the recipes before sealing the package back up for its return trip to GW. And thought I will just post those recipes here, where I can easily find them again. So here ya go, recipes ala Egglets. Ignore those directions referring to the "flat" side of the egg! I guess they are flat on one side when they cone out of the Egglet, but my eggs are never flat!

The Equipment List

68°f/20°C, foggy.

I admit, I am loving this autumn weather. Cool mornings, long shadows, leaves drifting down, and this morning a heavy fog that didn’t clear until after 10. Bliss.

The pears are hanging heavy but are not yet ripe, although some are starting to fall. These are old Bartlett pears, also called winter pears, that must be stored a while before ripening.  The thing is, many spoil before they ripening! So it's a careful game to get enough to can or otherwise preserve.

Clyde avoided the damp morning by camping out in one of his favorite places. 

This planter of impatiens managed to survive the heat and drought and still provides a bright spot of color.

I spent most of the day in the kitchen again. Yesterday I canned a few jars of vegetable soup,  and I made a second batch today. While that was in process I picked the meat from a rotisserie chicken we had for supper Friday evening. I made the meat into chicken salad, and then started a pot of broth with the bones.

Cooking from scratch and preserving most of our food takes a lot of time, as I guess regular readers know. And makes a lot of dirty dishes! But the end result is so satisfying. My friend Batsy (a nickname from her storytelling days) suggested that a post about all the equipment needed for food preservation, so here's a stab at it. Let's see:

• A pressure canner is a must if one wants to put up meats and low acid foods. I havev3, just to have backup, and often have 2 going at the same time.
• A water bath canner for fruits, pickles, and tomatoes. I have 2 or 3 of these too.
• A jar lifter to get hot jars out of the canners
• Jars! Lots and lots of them. And lids and rings. The lids must be replaced with every use but the rings can be used over and over. I have used about 250 lids so far this year, much less than usual.
• A food processor isn't a necessity but certainly can make chopping stuff up much easier, and saves a lot of time. 
• I also find my immersion blender indispensable these days for purees. I can't think how I got along for so many years without it.
• A dehydrator is great for herbs, onions, peppers and a host of other things that can be dried and stored. 
• A vacuum sealer is another tool that's not a necessity, but food sealed with one doesn't freezer burn and stays in good shape much longer than with traditional bags. 
• A candy thermometer for making jam. Getting it to the right temperature makes the difference as to how well the jam will set. Not foolproof,  but a big help.
• The Victorio strainer is amazing for making applesauce and tomato juice 
• A meat slicer and a meat grinder are needed when deer season come around, or if I find pork loin or roasts cheap. We can slice our own chops that way.
• The big copper apple butter kettle makes an annual appearance, along with its stirrer.
• Ditto the cider press. It's not going to be used much this year as our apples didnt do well, so unless we find a source for apples, it will mainly be making pear cider.
• A drying rack is handy for hanging herbs, hot peppers and garlic.
• Baskets--half bushel and peck-- for picking and short term storage. And buckets for picking.
• Then there is all the other small stuff: a food mill for small batches of apple sauce, canning funnels, ladies, a jelly bag and stand, colander and strainers, cheesecloth for straining, a drying rack for pasta, a pasta machine. If I went in the kitchen and looked in the cupboards and drawers, I am sure i could add to this list 
• And the other big stuff, mainly BIG pots! I have three stock pots, I think, and often all three are in use. 
• Let's not forget the biggest thing: storage! The cellar is our main storage, but we store potatoes and winter squash in the back room. The large pantry cupboard holds most of our dry foods, the equipment cabinet holds most of the small appliances, and then there is the big pot cupboard, which is part of the kitchen base cabinets and was built just for that purpose. We have 2 freezers, one large upright and one smaller one. I know people who have 4 or 5 freezers but these two are enough for us. 

I think that's the list! Seems like a lot, but i have been at this over 50 years, so it gradually accumulated. We used to make butter so I still have my old churn, and finally sold my grain grinder a few years back. The churn, though, holds too many good memories so I am not ready to let it go yet.