My last post was a sad note about a jar of tomato pasta sauce that had failed me and was put into the refrigerator for more immediate use. If I could fit in the fridge, this is the hat I’d be wearing!

At that point in time I had the next batch of tomatoes cooking away on the stove top and had written a teaser about whether it would be pasta sauce or ketchup since I had not decided what direction to go. Well, I was wrong about that. I had forgotten that my favorite ketchup recipe starts off with some onions in the initial processing of the tomatoes which I had not included in that batch. So, after consulting my recipes, while that batch of milled tomatoes were simmering down on the stove top, I decided to roast some veggies to add to the sauce and make it into a hearty pasta sauce.

I chopped up some eggplants, green peppers, onions and roasted them on high heat in the oven.

After the sauce had reduced considerably, I added these roasted veggies and cooked it all a bit more before ladling into jars and processing with my pressure cooker into 5.5 pints.

Not sure if I’ve glossed over this, but just to be clear, there are two ways to hot process foods in glass jars.  One is pressure cooking which requires special equipment and the other is a hot water bath which just requires enough depth of a pot to submerge a jar of contents in water with at least an inch of water over the top while it boils. The acidity levels of each fruit or vegetable helps to decide which process is safest to use for the best outcome. There are charts and charts of times, sizes of jars and pounds of pressure to read and follow. I never really trust my memory and so I consult the charts and directions each time I work up a batch.

Although I followed all of the directions I had used in previous years for pressure processing the above mentioned batch of pasta sauce, I found a tinge of pink in the water of the cooker when I finished. This was disturbing to me. It suggests that one or more of the jars had their contents forced out (thru heat/pressure) over the seal and into the water. But, all of the jar lids popped down properly as normal so one would think this was okay but it still bothered me.

I’ve done some more research and have read conflicting comments about this result. Some say it is fine, others say it is cause for concern. For safety sake, I will place these jars in the refrigerator and watch them carefully.  My newest concern is that I would like to have a better way to regulate my wonderful BlueStar range which features the greatest BTUs available to the residential market – 22,000; enough to practically melt an aluminum pot if one is not careful! The pressure cooking/canning instructions indicate adjusting the heat to keep the pounds of pressure at a certain level for a set number of minutes. With my model of pressure cooker, the only way I can monitor the correct pressure, is to look at the steam value and evaluate the steam emerging from it and then listen to the rocking of the weight that sits on top of that valve and time the length of my observations with accordance to the recommended cooking times for each jar size and its contents. This has worked pretty well in the past but lately I’m a but frustrated by less than perfect results.

I spent some time on line recently reading about this and realized that I would feel much better with a pressure cooker that had a readable gauge on it to better calculate the pressure necessary (in other words how much heat) to exert on my jars when cooked with my Goliath of a stove top. I’m now in love with the All American Canner Company and their products! http://www.allamericancanner.com/  This is what I ordered.

In the mean time, I started to process some cucumbers into some sweet pickle relish from the same recipe I used with success last year.  It calls for 6 pounds of diced cucumbers as well as onion, green and red peppers.

I got all of this together in a large container and then put it thru an initial cold brining….ice and pickling salt over several hours, and then drained it and added more ice to sit some more.

I boiled a mixture of sugar/vinegar/spices and added the diced veggies to that.

I let this “marinate” for 24-36 hours. Some of the spices were bagged or contained so they could contribute their flavor but be removed from the result.

This resulted in 17 half pints of beautiful, sweet, pickle relish.

Yesterday morning (at 8am) I started on a double batch of ketchup using 16 pounds of dead ripe tomatoes.

These are a precious commodity this year since the cool weather is keeping down the production. With this cool trend continuing for so long, I’m worried the plants may get tricked into thinking it is fall already! As I mentioned, when making ketchup, you cook the tomatoes with diced onion for enhanced flavor.

Although this smells really good when cooking, the combination of spices and vinegar smells even better! I boiled up a pot of broken cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, celery seed and vinegar and let it sit while the rest of the process was on going.

Of course after the tomato/onion combo cooked for the appropriate time, I milled out the skins and seeds and set the results on the stove top to cook down to half the volume which takes hours and hours. Thanks go to Dave and Joyce who helped stir the pot a bit during the long day when I had to run to my job sites!

I then strained the spiced mixture and added it to the tomato sauce.

This then cooks down for several more hours until one has a thick, deep, red sauce, or KETCHUP!

I carefully popped this precious gold into half pints before cooking them in a water bath. You do the math…that is 2 pounds of tomatoes per half pint of ketchup!

Out popped 8 little shinny jars, 12 hours later at 8pm!

We adore our little red jars of ketchup, but we also have a great affinity (Nancy more than Dave!) for the peppery hot red sauce that I started making last year, called Sriracha. Those of you who read my non-blog previously will be familiar with the process but I’ll repeat it here.

I start out with a pound of our hot red peppers.

We have two varieties of them this year. One is called Mucho Nacho, the other is called Garden Salsa. They both are green before they turn red. From what I’ve read, by the time they turn red the heat intensity is a bit less. I wash, stem and slice them.

And then I turn my attention to peeling a cup full of fresh garlic. This takes time since there are many, many cloves that make up a cup of garlic!

I then blanch the garlic cloves twice by covering them with cold water and bringing them to a boil on the stove top. As soon as they come to a boil, I plunge them into ice water and repeat this process.

After the second time thru, I drain the cooled cloves and slice them very thinly and add them to the sliced red peppers.

To this mix, I add white wine vinegar and bring it to a boil and let it boil for 3 minutes. I then take it off the heat and add Light Agave Nectar (mildly sweet – like a mellow honey) and kosher salt and allow it to sit for an hour in order to allow the flavors to seep and cool. 

I then put the mixture into the Cuisinart with the metal blade to chop it all finely but it could probably also go into a blender. After this, put it back into its pan and bring it to a boil.

I boil it for 15 minutes or more until it has reduced and thickened. I add a bit of soy sauce and then thicken it all some more with a cornstarch/water mixture before putting the hot mess into jars and processing it in a water bath. After all that work, I ended up with 3 precious half pints of Sriracha!

I’m now looking for a hot green pepper sauce recipe since I have quite a few of those as well. As I search on line, I see a lot of references to Denver cooks and perhaps, my sister Julie will know of some recipes.

Dave is still out working on the daily harvest but his numbers from the past day or two have put us over 700 pounds of produce for the year so far. Although the weather has been enjoyable, we are wishing we had some warmer days to ripen the melons in our patch. We hope that a slower ripening time will not ill affect their flavor. Many people tell me that farmers complain about the weather no matter what it is! We seem to be in this category despite the delight that others are cheering about with this mild summer.

I’m off to the kitchen to roast some cherry tomatoes for our lovely pizza dinner tonight but had to share  one last photo. A friend who worked with Dave at AB for years, Carolyn Wolf, has been coming to the farm lately to visit and check out our progress so, we have shared some of our veggies with her over the last couple of weeks. Today she dropped by with this lovely pie…cherry…from a wonderful, small, local baker by the name of Sugaree. She claims she did not know that cherry was Dave’s favorite, but she obviously chose well!

There are many way to preserve various types of foods to store for consumption for many months and up to a year or more. I have books that address this and I have read extensively but I also rely on the on-line resources that detail home canning safety. I have found the University of Missouri Extension program to be excellent; their instructions for processing foods mirror those of other well respected programs.

Here is an example of what I have to watch out for with the preserving of foods. Earlier today, I processed 6 jars of  tomato pasta sauce which means that I added sauteed vegetables to the simmering, reducing sauce I had begun on the stove top. I then processed these jars using a pressure cooker and used the recommended amount of time for processing that was appropriate for the contents, the jar size, etc. The jars came out beautifully and the lids popped down promptly…save one.

That jar took a bit of  extra time, but it ultimately popped down. In reality, it kind of ‘punkered’ down versus popped, which was less than impressive. I was watching out for this one since it was suspect all along. When I tap on its lid, it makes a different sound from that of its companions. It does not convince me that it is 100%! So, I will pop this jar into the refrigerator and it will be safe and usable in the near future but not 8 months from now, which its companion jar will be after sitting on the shelf in the pantry for one year from now.

Gotta share this pic. We go thru sooo many gloves in a year. Sometimes they are just too caked with mud to even put ones hands into them. There are some gloves that are washable and Dave thought to put these guys thru the wash today. Viola, clean gloves…good to go!

News flash! I was writing about the weekend of food processing I’ve been doing when Dave took a mini break from the fields and was standing in the family room looking towards the orchard when he said, “What kind of an animal is that in the orchard?” I looked out and saw something that was moving low to the ground and looked like a beaver with a long, bushy tail. Of course, despite the fact that I had stuff simmering away on the stove top, I dashed out into the back with my cell phone for a camera. That was my first mistake…I should have gotten my telephoto.  So I approached this critter as it was meandering across the orchard. He was the size of a very large tabby, only low to the ground. He was not horrified of my presence but he did seem to scuttle along far enough ahead of me that it was difficult to get a photo. He did stop at one point and sat up on his hind legs and munched some grass while he looked around. I followed him to the northeast corner of the fence line and he climbed the fence and sat on the post top briefly before scampering down and away. I went back to my hot stove and it wasn’t until Tom and Joan Moore came over that we got out the pictures. Tom gets credit for correctly identifying what I saw as a Marmot. Of course, a quick visit to the computer tells me all I would ever want to know about the genus marmota! Ground Hogs are also sometimes called Marmots but this one really looked like the images I see on-line that are of marmots. Although it would not seem to be naturalized in this area of the country, marmots are also kept as pets and this one could have gotten loose??? Here is my fuzzy pic. If you look closely, you can see he is sitting up, looking towards me. One more animal to watch out for at night!

Joan and Tom were returning some items I had lent them for a party at their house last night. Some of the things they returned were these flower arrangements. Joan and I picked some of my hydrangeas and added euonymus branches to my square vases. This reminds me I should pick these more often! Joan could not keep them in her house since they are poisonous for her cats.

Well, we had another odd weather week to report for the summer of 2013. It was rather mild here most of the week with overcast skies and threats of rain nearly every day but the rain did not really have much impact since when it did arrive, it was very light and nearly unmeasurable. We were outside of the weather pattern that was south of us which brought devastating and deadly rains to so many communities in Southern Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Nebraska.  Sorry to be wishing for rain when they had so much more than their share! So, we continued to water but also had very little sunshine or warmth. One day last week I was harvesting at 5pm while wearing a cotton sweater on top of my shirt and was quite comfortable!

My hectic work week kept me from processing any veggies this week other than what we managed to eat for dinners and to share with family. With a steady harvest continuing, this means I’m behind at this point and all those veggies are staring me in the face, threatening to go south, if I don’t attack with gusto.

And that is exactly what I was determined to do first thing this weekend…attack! Items begging for my immediate attention were Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Eggplants and Peppers. I started with the tomatoes since they have been patiently waiting in their appointed slots in the laundry room sorting area since they cannot be refrigerated. We were fortunate to have been able to find some nice homes for some of them this week. Besides using them ourselves in all three meals every day, (BLT for breakfast, sliced on sandwiches at noon and roasted or in salads for dinners) we have shared them with family and friends who have enthusiastically made Israeli Salad (Lisa Portnoff), Marinated Veggie Salad (Kathy Bussmann), and Garden Salsa (Mary Francis Hebron). We also had folks who took delivery of our precious cherry tomatoes for snacking! What could be easier or more healthy! This is one day’s picking!

Despite eating and sharing tomatoes last week with several camps, I had 30 pounds that were ready for processing yesterday and many more waiting for my attention today. I started out with the most ripe and cut them up to make some pasta sauce. If you remember, last week I made plain tomato sauce but we use a lot of pasta sauce in many different recipes during the winter, so this was my goal today. I cut up about half of what was on hand.

I then cooked them down while sauteing the veggies I was going to add. This time it was onion, green peppers, mushrooms and garlic.

Not unlike the tomato sauce, after cooking the cored tomatoes, I put them thru the food mill and started reducing the resulting juice/pulp to a thicker sauce before adding my sauteed veggies. This takes hours to do but the results are so worth the effort. I got 6 pints this time.

While the sauce was reducing I eyed more than 4 pounds of green peppers in the prep kitchen fridge and washed and cut those into strips which I froze on a sheet pan before placing into ziplock bag bundles for future recipes this winter. This was very easy to do and satisfying since the processing is pretty quick and just involves deft knife work. I try to keep my knives super sharp so it is inevitable that I have cuts here and there. This is a cut I got from my knife just touching my finger! Of course I had to stop and wash and bandage before continuing. 

The Purple Nation, AKA the eggplants, were also rising up in protest again this week. I made a double batch of Eggplant Parm one night last week using my new favorite recipe/method from the Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.

We enjoyed several easy meals during the week of this eggplant dish and still have some to work our way thru in the fridge, but it dawned on me that these ‘cow pies’ are easy to re-heat and taste just as delish as the day they were made! So I decided to make up a bunch in advance and freeze them, pre-cooked, w/o the sauce or cheese. We like them so much that Dave says he could even eat one on a hamburger bun in place of a veggie burger! (He has come a long way from his old days of meat and potatoes!)

So, while the tomato sauce was reducing on the stove top, I added some necessary ingredients to the grocery list. Key to the list was Panko, a type of Japanese bread crumbs that are very crunchy and would be one of my ingredients in the eggplant parm.

I sliced up several pounds of shiny eggplants and sprinkled them with Kosher Salt and let them sit with weights to get some of the water out of the “meat”.

I then dredged them in flour to which I had added ground pepper. Then into beaten eggs, followed by the Panko to which I had also added ground pepper as well as freshly grated Parmesan cheese. My friend, Silvia Madeo, remarked on my earlier posting about tenderloins, that she followed a Julia Child method of dredging which followed the order of flour, egg, then crumbs.

This recipe did the same and I have made it with success before so I think I also like the order of dredging. Here is how these steps took place. First the flour dredging, followed by a dip in the egg bath.

Then after the egg,

a dip into the Panko

which includes freshly grated Parmesan cheese as well as fresh pepper.

I have adopted a left hand followed by a right hand practice which helps to keep the dredging less messy, but after 10 pounds of eggplant slices and three refills of the necessary ingredients, the fingers get a bit gloppy and the entire kitchen counter suffers from crumb-itis. Farley was pleased to find a wealth of crumbs on the floor which were inevitable, despite my carefulness.

Rinse and repeat about 50 times on the flour, egg, panko dip and you get this. 

I put my sheet pans into a very hot oven to pre-heat at 425 degrees. When very hot, I added a little bit of olive oil to each hot pan and then added the eggplant slices and popped them back in the hot oven to cook.

I followed the directions for turning, etc. and after about 30 minutes, I had this.

The outcome resulted in many, many dinners of re-heat-able cow pies!

While I’ve been processing the veggies, Dave has been actively harvesting. Here was yesterday’s haul.

To date, we have more than 600 lbs of produce with much of that weight coming from foods that retain lots of water such as cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes and potatoes. So, I continued this morning to process more pickles. I was able to make 15 quick pints of sweet pickles this morning but ran out of vinegar and will have to send Dave on a trip ‘into town’ for supplies.

In the meantime, we are watching the melons grow and grow and hope we will not have to be sharing them with marmots or any other creatures!

I’m back to the stove, processing the other half of the 30 pounds of tomatoes I mentioned before. I have lots of veggies I could roast to add to the sauce, but I’m tempted to make it into our favorite Ketchup. Tune in next time to find out the answer!

I managed to make another batch of both dill (8 pints) and sweet pickles (7 pints) yesterday afternoon, using 12 pounds of cucumbers. There are still many pounds of cucumbers waiting their turn in the prep kitchen fridges. So far, I’ve made 71 pints of pickles this year and I’m sure there will be more! We plan to share pickles with friends and family in the year to come and will have our holiday gifts at the ready! With red bows, these green gems even fit the holiday colors and will certainly be ready for eating by that time!

I also froze some of our green peppers. From what I’ve read, green peppers do not require any blanching before freezing. What a relief…one less hot, boiling pot on my stove! It has been a wonderful year for peppers…I guess they just love the cool, wet summer we have had and as a result, they have nice, thick walls and are large enough in size to rival those you see in the stores.

So, I washed and sliced my peppers, laid them on half sheets which I then froze for an hour before packaging the pieces by tucking them into Ziplock Freezer bags and removing the excess air with a straw. No, I have not invested in a vacuum sealer yet! 

I got exactly 4, one pound bags and expect many more before the harvest is over. Now if only I could get some red ones!

Today I moved on to tomato processing….finally! We have been waiting to have enough big tomatoes to makes sauces and Catsup with and we finally do. (I can’t decide which spelling I prefer for this…Catsup or Ketchup…I may have to investigate the origins of the spellings and then will decide. Somehow, the version of ‘Catsup’ makes me feel ‘behind’ which is a constant feeling but not a positive one. I may have to switch to Ketchup! Dave’s input is that one of these may be a patented name by one of the companies that produces it. More homework!)

This year we planted 4 types of tomatoes from Burpee – Sweet Cherry 100s, (which we have dubbed Sweet 1000s since we get sooo many cherries off of these plants!) Romas, Celebrities and Big Boys. Our research says that the Roma tomatoes are among the best for canning and you can see why.

They are very meaty with few seeds or gelatinous material between the chambers. Their skin is a bit less red and more orange color in tone which threw me a bit since I kept waiting for that deeper red color to come about and it did not. This is also a very firm fruit to the touch. When processing, there is very little waste which makes them a very tidy tomato to prepare. Here are the little darlings I used today.

I attempted to make an all Roma sauce today, but did not have enough of them and so added some of my other large tomatoes. (Excuse the nauseatingly out of focus photo.) I’m pleased with both the Celebrity and the Big Boy too.

It was a tough call to make sauce rather than catsup today since there is nothing more fun than making catsup. It smells divine while cooking, which it does FOREVER, but that will be my next happy tomato adventure once I get some sauce under my belt.

This is the time of year when we take our bathroom scale and move it to the mudroom area in order to weigh up the heavy stuff. I’m not sure why we keep it in the master bathroom since I obviously am not stepping onto it very often.

It came in handy this morning as I was weighing up 16 pounds of cored and trimmed fruit!

I put this on the stove top to cook down and wouldn’t you know it, one of my favorite wooden spoons snapped at the weight of the stirring!

After this came to a boil, I gave it another 15 minutes of cooking before turning off the heat. I let this gloppy mess cool down a bit and then put it thru my food mill to get rid of the skins and seeds.

Here are the resulting skins and seeds, ready for the compost.

I really wanted to try out my new food mill but I need to investigate a location for this tool so that I get the best production out of an awkward set up.

As you can see, this lovely item clamps onto a surface and then allows one to crank away at the cooked product while separating the skin/seeds from the meat/juice. I plan to work on a better way to set this up in the future, but in the meantime, I did not mind using my old food mill one bit today since it is dandy too.

Here is the sauce, simmering away on my stove top.

It needs to reduce by anywhere between 1/3 and 1/2 before being thick enough to be considered tomato sauce. This process takes hours!  I was pleased to have gotten as much sauce as this from the weight of tomatoes I cooked. I think the Romas had some impact on this outcome.

What do you do while waiting for the sauce to reduce? Well, Farmer Dave is working his butt off out in the fields but even he is somewhat limited to his activities since we had a lovely rain yesterday and over night. Our gauge says it was less than half an inch but it was so welcome and more is predicted in the days to come.

I can’t really leave my post here with kitchen duties since I need to stir every so often. So, besides writing the blog, I have been busy with a couple of other items. Dave brought home additional canning jars from Walmart today.

And I then had to get them sterilized in a hot, hot dishwasher cycle to use.

I have also been “watering” the orphaned orchids that people tend to give me for rehabilitation. I think this is due to the fact that just about every big box store has orchids for sale these days but no one really wants the ones w/o blooms…except for me! Yes, if you have a place to let them to sit, bloom-less, they will eventually spike a new shoot and be full of blooms once again!
In my opinion, the best way to water these is with ice cubes, which melt slowly and allow the plant to absorb moisture over time which is what they prefer. The other plants that like this method are Mother-In-Law Tongues. This is a very old type of plant that my mother always kept as I was growing up and so I have affinity for it too. They like ice cubes as well.

So, here is the result of an entire day of processing tomatoes into tomato sauce, with the final output being a great tomato sauce. I hope you can have appreiciation that 16 pounds of tomatoes were transformed into 5 pints of sauce. One container cracked, bummer.

Yes, I’m addicted to photos. Thank God smart phones now have such a nice built in camera which makes it easier to use verses the days when I used get my dear, Canon SLR out of my back pack to photograph something. Now days, I just whip out my phone and can record my life story as it unfolds before me.

If I could have chosen a career path, 35 years ago, it would have been photo journalism. Not that I was trained as a journalist, far from it since I can barely string together a proper sentence, but I loved imagery and I loved the words that described images. My constant phrase is: “if you don’t have a photo, it didn’t happen.”  I kind of mean that, but I worry about all the things that would not have happened if I had not photos so there goes that sentiment down the drain.

This blog is mostly about the Farm here at Seven Oaks, (capitalization makes important words stand out, eh?) but I may have to interject some other photos from my day/s to make it what I want it to be…more of a log of all aspects of my life. (Just wait for the knitting photos that will flood this area in the coming winter months!)

Photography on an iPhone doesn’t come close to an ideal, but here are some of my pics from my other day time occupation.

I was picking up some plated hardware at Theiss Plating in good ole STL today and I saw this gorgeous item! It caught my breath!

My dear friend, Lockwood, (an employee who I regularly deal with there) told me the history of it. It is in the possession of a man who owns a restaurant in O’Fallon (not sure if this is O’F ,MO or O’F, IL). This service urn is was a feature on display at their restaurant but had somehow fallen and was damaged. So Theiss Plating was repairing it and brought it back to its original luster. It is a magnificent piece in every way! The interior is porcelain lined and the exterior is obviously copper and brass with wooden handles that act as insulation for ones hands when serving. It was a joy to be able to see it and touch it!

One of the best parts of this story is that a local family business produced this item back in the day. Kismet…the family that owns this business, Ford Restaurant Supply, (at one time perhaps Ford Hotel supply?) http://www.fordstl.com/ , is still in operation here in STL. I know this because the family lives two doors down from me! See the tag on the piece?

Wow, I just love bumping into these types of items as I go about my day.

Another photo of the day is one of the “grouchy” painters. My day is made up of running from job site to job site and making sure things are as I designed them to be. By the time things get to the painting stage, I’m often not critical to the picture, but my clients often want me to crack the whip on all stages of the project so I try to keep the painters in line even if they resent it. So, with all good intentions of winning over the cranky painters on one of my jobs, today I plied them with donuts and it seemed to cheer them up a bit. Here they are, gladly posing with a box of goodies!

I don’t know why I have some satisfaction from these pics, but they are things that I have bumped along to see today and if I don’t share them, they are perhaps lost.

So, I was at it again yesterday…yes, pickling, but only after a long day at work so unfortunately, I did not start the processing until late afternoon. This time, I’m investigating the dill category of the pickle making world. My mother told me that my sister, Lisa, prefers the dills to the sweets, so what better reason to get my act together on dills!?!

Last year, in addition to lots of sweet pickles, bread ‘n butter pickles and pickle relish, I also made Fresh Kosher Dills. The dills were simple to make and beautiful to look at but they didn’t taste very ‘dill’ like. I used a recipe that called for whole pickles, as many of the dill recipes prescribe, but unless you are going to just chomp on a whole pickle – as many true delis serve them -slicing the pickles to lay on a sandwich is just one extra step at sandwich making time. I guess you can say that slicing the cucumbers at pickle making time is the same time consumption, but I’m trying to gain appreciation for the final product so I guess I can slice a million cucumbers before hand in order to gain a smile from the sandwich maker, Dave, at lunch time.

It finally dawned on me that the dill pickles I really wanted to make today were actually called “Hamburger Dills”. This category of pickles are both dill and sliced. This does not mean that I won’t try the whole dills again, but there is something about building a sandwich with a pickle slice as one of the layers that is intuitive to us. I just consulted Farmer Dave on this subject and he was cute to give his definition of a sandwich: “Two pieces of bread, a condiment or two (such as Nancy’s homemade mustard), pickles, cheese and whatever else you have on hand as far as other ingredients.”

So, sandwich making in our household almost always includes a pickle. We even put pickles on grilled cheese. If you have not tried it, you should! Yes, the pickle is included between the slices of bread and various cheeses rather than served on the side. Divine, especially with my mustard!

As we have plenty of cucumbers (as well as plenty of newly processed jars of pickles) at the ready we have started to offer some of each to friends and have been gobsmacked with the answers we have received. One friend recently said they still had the pickle jar in the fridge from several months ago and acted as if that might last them until Christmas. Another friend declined the offer of pickling cucumbers to process into pickles since hardly anyone in their family ate them.

This is starting to sound a bit like the chicken and the egg scenario. Do we eat so many pickles because we have so many cucumbers? or do we grow so many cucumbers because we love pickles so much? Well, I guess the answer is obvious since we planted even more varieties of cucumbers that are specifically for pickling than we did last year. Boy, are we glad, but we must be oddly pickle crazy. Perhaps this pickle craziness stems from the German blood that rages in both our bodies…the Luehrman/Graupner/Telligman/Sauerhoffs were all attracted to vinegar?!? Vinegar is good for the digestive system and some even say it makes one smarter! (No, I just added that since I’m becoming a little pickle sensitive.)

So, as I started out the processing today, I began with 9 pounds of lovely cucumbers which I washed and scrubbed in order to create two batches of hamburger dills.

I sliced them up and brined them with pickling salt and tap water and let them sit for two hours in my large crocks.

I put a plate on each batch and added the weight of no less than my jars of vinegar for some pressure. They will brine like this for two hours.

In the meantime, I have to tell about my new favorite item. It is a compost container that I got on a recent trip to the local Williams Sonoma store. I found this item on the ‘Sale, Sale, Sale’ shelf and just love that I can replace the plastic yogurt container I keep under my sink, for the same purpose, with this lovely item. I’m almost tempted to keep it on the counter top!

Those are not just holes in the top of the lid…there is a black filter that tucks up into the underside of the lid and provides for air circulation while keeping the fruit flies away. I wanted to buy all of these they had and give them for gifts in order to encourage everyone to compost their kitchen parings, but I held back. If anyone reads this in a timely fashion, they are probably still available to purchase!

Back to the pickle making… After letting them brine in pickling salt and water for two hours, I drained and rinsed them. I then concocted a mixture of white vinegar and garlic cloves and heated it up on the stove top and brought that to a boil. 

I pulled out the garlic cloves and added two to each prepared pint jar. Each jar also received some dill, dill seeds and several black peppercorns. The reason I added the dill seeds was due to the fact that this dill was very young and had not gone to seed yet. The seed, I’ve learned, has much of the dill flavor.

Then I added the cuke slices to the hot vinegar mixture and cooked them until they changed from bright green to dull green.

I then loaded up the waiting jars with the cukes and they looked like this before I capped them.

After processing the jars in the boiling water bath, they came out all shiny and wonderful! Viola, 12 pints of hamburger dills!

In other news, the harvest today was over 32 pounds and Dave asked me to photograph it.

Total year to date of harvest is 390 pounds, 82 pounds of which are cucumbers, thus, a blog with the sub title, ‘Why We Eat So Many Pickles’!

By the way, Dave says the melons are multiplying like rabbits! He put newspaper under more than 20 of them yesterday in order to protect the bottoms from sitting in damp conditions as they sit and ripen. I can’t wait but part of the reason for that is that we do not process them, we just eat them and it is a whole lot less work on my part!

I’m just as busy as a bee today! My last post mentioned that I was going to start looking for ways to preserve the myriad of peppers that have been harvested so far and will be coming in rapidly in the future. It turns out that many of my reliable sources recommend merely freezing the cut up peppers rather than going thru the blanching process with them first. This was encouraging news since I have trays of large, California Wonder Peppers that look like this. 

They say that peppers keep in one’s refrigerator for about a week after harvest before starting to deteriorate. That says something about the peppers one buys at the grocery, doesn’t it! So, I’ll process my peppers for freezing so that they get the best use in the coming winter months, (and I’m sure you will be reading about that in the future) but in the meantime, I was struck by one of the labels of my many Heinz cider vinegar bottles which read, ‘Pepper Perfect’.

The partner bottle of white vinegar read, ‘Pickle Perfect’,

So I guess someone has a seasonal marketing goal at the Heinz Company since an older version of this same vinegar is advertising ‘Easter Egg Dyeing’ and the role that vinegar plays in that process!

Nonetheless, the label for Pepper Perfect Vinegar caught my eye and I spotted a recipe on the back side of the label for Hot Pepper Jelly. The recipe called for green peppers and jalapenos combined with other sweet and sour ingredients in order to make a type of jelly. I’ve eaten this jelly on top of cream cheese on a cracker and it is pretty tasty, but I’ve never made the jelly until today. My mother agreed that she likes this pepper jelly served as an appetizer so what better endorsement than one from your mother? I confirmed that the Heinz recipe is similar to others one can easily find so I decided to follow the instructions from the cleverly marketed Heinz people.

So, here goes. Diced green peppers with Jalapenos……

Add vinegar, Sure Gel and cook until it boils and this is the result.

Then add some sugar and honey. This honey came from my Uncle Bill who lives in South Carolina. He gave it to my mom and she has shared it with me here. I’m sure he will be glad that it has found a good use!

Boil the heck out of it as directed

and you get a mess on the stove top! Sorry in advance, Joyce!

But here are the results after processing the little jars!

I resisted the suggestion of adding food coloring, (either green or red) to the jars since I’m a natural kind of gal. If I weren’t, I guess I wouldn’t have grey hair and wrinkles to show for all my years of experiences!

What a gorgeous day to be out harvesting. The conditions could not have been nicer…bright blue skies, white puffy clouds, no humidity, with the high temperature in the mid 70s. There was a slight breeze and I could hear the birds chattering away as well as the not so distant sound of a small, twin engine airplane tooling around for fun.

I took Farley out to the fields with me this afternoon and he immediately started to investigate far and wide. I think the neighbors must get tired of me calling for him to get back to me but he loves to wander and investigate so I’m always trying to locate the little dickens before an owl or hawk locates HIM!.  He did not find any scat or deteriorating animal remains to roll in today – despite a determined effort on his part. Thankfully, this meant he will not have to be bathed in the laundry room sink which is often the case after one of his thorough snooping expeditions.

I picked all sorts of goodies: various tomatoes, green peppers, hot peppers, squash, scallions and cucumbers. It was daring to be out at this time of day since the Cicada Wasps are still very active and were buzzing around me the whole time. Dave tries to wait until later in the day when they seem to settle down, but I was on a mission and brazenly advanced my objective despite their presence. The only area that spooked me was the eggplant patch where it seemed they were a bit too active for my nerve so I did not venture over there despite sagging branches laden with fruit. Here is a pic of today’s harvest which totalled 6 pounds 10.25oz. Although Dave is the keeper of the Excel Harvest Weight File, I think what I contributed yesterday and today will raise the total for the year to over 324 pounds of produce so far. Had I done any potato or eggplant harvesting, today, this number would have likely been closer to 335 or 340 pounds.

Unfortunately, I also came away with a tomato picking rash which is mostly on my arms – but it was worth it to get all these goodies. My next order of business is to investigate some options for preserving the peppers. We have heavy load of California Wonders as well as spicy Nacho Muchos. I’m really waiting for more of the Garden Salsas to redden in order to make more of my Sriracha sauce which was very popular last year!

Last week, while I was out of town, Dave fended for himself and kept the farm running in my absence. This wasn’t too much of a challenge for him since he does so much of the heavy work here anyway. But yesterday he took off for Maryland to attend his cousin’s wedding which puts me in charge of the farm. I’m sure he was a little nervous about handing over all the responsibilities to me, but as luck would have it, a light rain started to fall just as I returned from dropping him at the airport. Although the rain lasted several hours, the volume was fairly insignificant so I’ll be back to watering chores this weekend. The cooler weather we enjoyed for most of last week got even cooler over night and it feels like fall! Isn’t it ironic that our high temperatures this year (today is predicted to be high of 77) are lower than the low temps from last year!?! They are talking about a record low for tonight. Again, some of our plants will enjoy the cool and others will just sit and wait for the heat to return.

After the rain ended yesterday I went out to harvest more cukes. Here is what the patch looked like after the nice rain.

I found many nice bees working to keep up with all of the pollinating.

As well as an over load of Cicada Killer Wasps. I wonder if they do any pollinating as well.

I brought in 5 pounds 6 3/4oz of cucumbers. I added these to a refrigerator full of cukes from the last couple of days and weighed them all in order to devise a plan for pickle making today.  There were more than 22 pounds waiting to be processed!

So, I got to work early this morning and made two more batches of sweet pickles using 10 pounds of produce that produced 12 more pints.

So far this year I’ve made 45 pints of pickles…all in the last two or so weeks and the season has barely started. Here is what my pantry pickle shelves look like after this morning’s processing. Remember, all but the bottom shelf in this photo has jars that are two deep.

While I was harvesting last night I found that the melons have set on and are growing cute, hairy, little fruits.

Here is a pic of that patch.

I see that I will have plenty of tomatoes to harvest this weekend to add to the bounty that is already waiting for consumption.

This is one of the ways that we prepare a summer dinner. I slice up a green and a yellow squash, an eggplant, some green peppers, onion and whole cherry tomatoes and drizzle this mixture with really nice olive oil, a grind of sea salt and fresh black pepper. I often will add a chicken breast or two to the center of the pile and recently have added one hot pepper, sliced, for some zing.

I pop this into a hot oven for 45 minutes or so, checking on it and giving it a stir a couple of times, add some balsamic vinegar towards the end and and add our fresh basil leaves when it is done. It comes out looking like this.

Nothing could be easier or more healthy than this. Sometimes we serve this on a starch, like rice or pasta but it is also easy to slice the roasted chicken and wrap it all up in a flour tortilla….healthy and tasty!

That said, we are experimenting with a new device this year. We did some research and purchased a special kind of juicer. This juicer is considered a slow, or cold juicer since it does the work of juicing at a slower pace and therefore keeping the heat of a faster motor away from the product. Here is the one we bought when there was a 20% off sale and free shipping.

Look for more posts about our experiences in the world of juicing! In the meantime, I’m off to pick blueberries which are nearly at the end of their production. Next up, I will try to figure out how to best preserve some of the other abundances that are in our prep refrigerators. I think I’m going to attempt to do something with the green peppers this afternoon, but I must harvest first.

We have switched gears here. After endless rain in the spring and early summer, we are now anxious for some good ole rain. We had a 30% chance yesterday and got an unmeasurable sprinkle in the morning and then nothing for the rest of the day. The weather folks were predicting rain for today but we’ve had cloudy skies and some thunder – enough to make Farley anxious – and nothing but a random drop or two. I think our chances are slim for getting any precipitation after tonight and they are not predicting any additional chances for it until next weekend. Oh boy, back to watering, watering, watering!

I may start to sound like a broken record very soon, but I’m determined to keep up with the harvest that comes in the door these days. I figure if I can nibble away each day with a batch of preservation (freezing or canning for now, but I’m reading up on drying as well as vacuum packing too!) then we will appreciate the usage during the winter.

So, I had lots of cucumbers staring me in the face this morning despite the fact that I used 8 pounds in pickles just yesterday! This morning I dug out the recipe we really enjoyed from last year’s sweet pickling. This recipe called for 4 quarts of pickling cucumbers so I weighed up 5 pounds and sliced them and then measured them in a 2 quart container (X 2)  in order to try to get a handle on how many pounds would equal that which was called for in the recipe. It seemed that 5 lbs was just right for a 4 quart measurement. This recipe also called for sliced onions and green peppers the last of which also came from our fields. (We have onions, but not enough volume to add to this recipe or else we wouldn’t have enough for salads, etc.)

This recipe used a cold brining process where one is instructed to add pickling salt and crushed ice to the freshly sliced fruits and let sit for 3 hours to brine, which I did. This reminds me of making ice cream, where the process of adding salt to the ice makes the outcome even colder and that was what was happening to my marinating pickles today.

While they sat for 3 hours, I did some knitting. More on that later. Here are the slices in the salt and ice. I also read up on things that can go wrong with ones pickles in a way that makes them still edible but not so pretty. It is good to know these things. Heads up for darkened pickles which means you have too much iron in your water. Also, shriveled pickles mean that you’ve plunged your cucumbers into a solution of salt, vinegar or sugar that is too strong for them to absorb in one session. This was interesting to note since I was using a two stage process of brining today…the first 3 hours in salt and ice before the sugar and vinegar part which came later. Thank goodness for the internet!

After they sat in the brine, I drained them and added them to a large pot on the stove that contained a hot mixture of the typical sweet pickle ingredients: sugar, cider vinegar, turmeric, mustard seed, and celery seed. The turmeric gives the pickles that wonderful yellow/orange color that we expect to see in a sweet pickle jar; that was one item missing in the sweet pickles I made up yesterday. I brought this mixture to a boil and filled the house with the aroma of PICKLES, which brought Dave out to the kitchen in admiration. If he didn’t love pickles on his daily sandwiches so much, I’m not sure I’d make quite so many jars!

The recipe said it would make 8 pints but I only got 7 from this one. Hmmm, not a problem, but I greedily wish I had one more jar! I popped them into the boiling water bath for 5 minutes and they came out just lovely. The sound of the popping of the lids is just music to my ears and these all popped within moments of coming out of their bath.

So, during the three hour break in the action, I worked on one of my projects from the knitting conference. I had taken a class from a great instructor and we were supposed to produce a Fair Isle, Steeked,  Wristlet during our class as a learning project. I produced one during the class but was not 100% satisfied with it so since we had enough materials to make a ‘pair’, I decided to knit the other one this morning while I waited for the pickles to brine. What is a Wristlet? Well, I guess some people have cold wrists and wear them both for warmth and also for a fashion statement? He is my wristlet before adding the buttons.

I also worked on a couple of other knitted project swatches for my program requirements but did not produce satisfying results on them yet. The final year of the Master Hand Knitting program is challenging and it will be something that I’ll be focusing on during the upcoming winter months when the farm is less demanding.

I was about to publish this post when we went out to the fields to do the day’s harvesting. We found lots of goodies out there but most importantly, we decided to bring in the few peaches that we had in the orchard this year. We had been instructed to reduce the stress on the young orchard trees by eliminating much of their fruit in the first couple of years but it has been pretty tempting to allow a few, select fruit to ripen here and there. So, here was what I brought in this afternoon for the 2013 peach crop.

Of course, while out in the field, I could not help but snap another pic. This was of Dave standing next to one of our European Hornbeam trees that were planted two years ago in the allee as a signature of the property.

We think they have grown leaps and bounds since the initial planting on a very, very, cold, wet day in early March of 2011.  This is what we did that day as far as clearing out the old horse paddocks and planting the new, young trees.  This is what they started out looking like:

And this is what we are expecting them to look like in the future: