Summer Canning

The morning is cool and quiet, cloudy. In the dining room, the red currants are draining; the gooseberries have been tipped and tailed. After breakfast, I wander to the basement, find the steam canner, gather the jars and long loops of rings handing on Christmas cords. Half way up the stairs, the lids are tucked in amongst the cleaning supplies.  Metal changes on metal as I dump everything on the kitchen table. It is time for the summer rituals to begin.

First, I boil the currant juice. Poured into half pint jars and sealed, we can drink the juice with fizzy water in the winter. Vitamin C. It is a deep red and stains the counter. The canner, with the usual quart of honey weight on the lid, rattles and steams. In the living room, NPR explains the news. While the currants seal, I make the gooseberry jam, boiling sugar and berries together, testing the transformation of juice into jam. It finishes just before the timer buzzes for the currants. Move quickly—trade the jars. Replace the lid, the weight, start the timer once more.  Clean up. Summer work on quiet mornings, before the day grows warm.

Lammastide-- The Early Harvest Season

                Lammastide is clearly here when, every day, I haul more food into the house from various gardens than we can eat. Even though I have designed our garden to feed us a huge variety of fresh food, not fifty pounds of tomatoes or green beans in one day, it still gets away from me in early August.  So I dry and can and pickle for an hour or so a day.

                Today I harvested a five gallon bucket of apples, a big bowl of blackberries, and a basketful of green beans, as well as a bowl of tomatoes, mostly cherry sized.  As I sliced the apples thinly and arranged them on the trays to dry, I imagined where they were going to be eaten next year. Many will go to work or school, so that we have something to chew on in the late afternoons. Some will fuel us on trail hikes. We’ll re-hydrate handfuls for oatmeal and yogurt in the mornings. I’ll carry a bag of dried fruit with me everywhere next winter. You never know when you’ll need a snack. Yesterday’s apples became seven jars of apple butter, slowly cooked down in the crockpot overnight. Tomorrow’s will be applesauce—and when that’s all done, I will roam the neighborhood scavenging wild fruit to press into cider.

                The green beans became four jars of Dilly Beans, ready to join the batch of Bread and Butters I made yesterday. Here, the steam canner comes in very handy. It is easy to haul out and can four or five jars of something, like pickles or jam, without the hour long process of heating water in the big pot. When I used the boiling water pot, I waited and collected produce, then had a mad rush of processing and canning. It was exhausting. Now, I can run a batch of something through before dinner and the shelves fill up slowly but steadily, day to day. It also saves energy!

                Blackberries are good fresh off of the vine, warm from the sun, while the chickens hope for dropped fruit. I throw some into quart jars and freeze them for muffins in the winter. I’ve made jam from the wild ones, straining out the seeds. But today, the bowl of berries is just the right size for a pie. And I am thinking of cutting little circles out of the crust so that the juice bubbles up and through. That would finish off our dinner of zucchini and tomatoes and salad nicely, especially with a little ice cream.

                I’ll be doing this work every day for the next few weeks. Roasted tomatoes and jars of salsa, more jars of dried and canned fruits and veggies, and then potatoes and longkeeper tomatoes, squashes and apples, tucked away to be eaten all winter long. A little effort now—huge benefits all winter long. It’s a fair trade. 

Apple Butter

Quarter a big pot full of apples. Don't worry about skins or seeds, but whack off the nasty bits and bugs. Toss into a large pot, add about half a cup of water, and cook quickly into mush.

Push the mush through a food mill to remove skins and seeds. I balance mine over the crockpot rather than dirtying a bowl. Add half a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of cinnamon, and a bit of allspice. 

Set the crockpot on low heat and place in  a corner with the lid off. Leave all day or over night. Stir occasionally.  The apple butter is ready when it has reduced by half. 

Can in half-pint jars. It is not as shelf stable once opened as jam, so this reduces waste. Process for ten minutes in the steam canner. 

Canning Season has Begun

         

  Some years, the preserving season comes on quickly. This was one. It has been a warm, dry spring, so I should not have been surprised when my friend Maureen, who has two lovely cherry trees, casually informed me that the cherries were ready. Cherries wait for no man; they must be picked and preserved within twenty four hours, unlike later fruits and veg, which can sit in the larder for a few days until there is time in the schedule book. I dug out the two picking buckets, scrubbed out some dirt from last season, and headed over.

            Her trees are beautiful. Green healthy leaves with the deep red fruit hidden underneath in dense clusters, the center pruned out so a tree climber can hoist herself up to the highest point for the ripest fruit, and a convenient branch to rest the bucket on while picking high. We picked for forty five minutes and filled our two buckets with glistening fruit. But it was already beginning the downward slide; some were bird pecked and others beginning to rot. Just in time.

            At home, we set up the pitting assembly line with the food dryer between us. I pit, Mark splits and arranges on a tray. It took an episode of This American Life  to complete the task in the cool evening. While Mark set up the dryer in the dining room, where it would hum into the night, I pitted six more pints for canning. As always, we had lids left over from last year. You never know, really, when the season will end and exactly how many lids you will need. The steam canner made quick work of the six jars and by bedtime, we had processed two thirds of the fruit. This morning, I ran another, smaller, load through the dryer and tossed some into the freezer for a pie. We are, after all, leaving for vacation in the morning.

            So the season has begun. I have tucked raspberries and cherries into the freezer, washed off the canning equipment, and stashed the canner in the larder half way down the cellar stairs, where it will spend the summer.  Next week, I will inventory what we have left and what we need to set aside for this summer, but we will always jump on an offer of free fruit. 

Cherry Pie

Make and roll out two crusts. Lay one in the pie pan and set the other aside to turn into lattice work.

5-6 cups of cherries

2T of tapioca

.5 c of sugar 

.5 t salt

Mix fruit, sugar, etc together and spread into pie shell. Using a knife or pastry wheel (much cooler looking!), cut strips of dough. Lay across the fruit and weave together.

Bake in 350 oven until bubbly. Eat with vanilla ice cream in the back yard.

Harvest Reckoning, 2014

Here it is—the annual reckoning of the harvest….

Tomatoes:

salsa 8 pints

                        Roasted 25 half pints

                        Dried 3 quarts

                        Longkeepers 10 pounds

Apples:

            Sauce 15 pints

            Cider 14 quarts

            Dried 6 quarts

            Butter 14 half pints

Blueberries:

            Frozen 2 quarts

            Dried 2 quarts

Peaches:

            Dried—2 quarts

            Canned 8 pints

Figs:

            Dried 3 quarts

Zucchini—one quart dried

Grapes:

            Dried 4 pints

            Juice 14 quarts

Pickles:

            Dill 6 quarts

            Senfgurken 5

            Beets 7 pints

            Red Cabbage 3 pints

Red Currant Juice: 5

Potatoes:

            Desiree 25 lbs.

            Ruby Crescent 8 lbs

            Yukon Gold 24 lbs

            Kennebec 21 lbs.

            All Blue 25 lbs

4 pumpkins

3 sweetmeat squashes

Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Pasta

Cube an eggplant and roast it in olive oil until soft. 

Saute onions in big cast iron frying pan until soft. Add eggplant and two half pints of roasted tomatoes, as well as a handful of olives, some salt and pepper, and basil.  You can also add a can of nice tuna, which puts the whole meal over the top.

Cook a large handful of whole wheat spaghetti. Mix the whole mess together and top with Parmesan cheese. Eat with salad.

Homestead Style Canning

      

    There was a bit of grumbling at the Sunbow planting table this morning. Apparently, a woman had ordered seven pounds of pickling cucumbers. Harry packed them up, put them in a wooden box, and set them out for her. When she came, she dug through the box, turned down half of the fruits, and took the rest in the wooden box. It was not clear, to begin with, which was the more nervy action—the rejection of perfectly healthy food, that was not the exact shape she wanted, or taking the box. The question swirled around the table—why does it matter what the shape of the fruit is? Isn’t canning about putting food by for the winter, taking the surplus—whatever it is—and preserving it in a tasty fashion to liven up that month of cabbage and potatoes that seasonal eaters are staring down in mid-March? If the cucumbers are larger, then why not pickle them in another way?   The Joy of Pickling has all sorts of recipes. I know. Sunbow had a surplus of cucumbers last year and I made five different types of pickles, working with the fruits in all stages of development from delicate to tough.

            There are, we decided, two types of food preservers. There are the artisanal cooks, who choose recipes that look tasty then collect the ingredients needed to create that particular recipe. They use the pretty green glass jars and labels and their preserves are always tasty and tastfully done. And then there are the homesteading, farming types, who take whatever is bursting from the gardens, whatever is falling from the neighbor’s trees, whatever is left over at the end of the market, bring it home, pile it in the basement and think “Now what?” while rummaging through the old canning books.  They can be tempted by phrases like “it’s going to be thrown on the compost pile if you don’t take it,” and “I found that putting them up in simple syrup worked pretty well last year,” or “Have you tried roasting these yet?”

   

         This year, I’ve preserved plums, beets, cabbage, and cucumbers so far, as well as red currant juice—and the season has only just begun. Apples, blueberries, and tomatoes are all waiting in the larder. There are three things that have made this work much easier. The first is my steam canner that I purchased from Territorial Seeds five years ago. Now, rather than putting on the huge canning pot of water that took forever to heat and weighed a ton to dump out when I was finished, I bring out the steam canner, add a quart of water to the bottom, and off we go. I can put up a small batch of something in an hour or so. Canning is a daily occurrence, rather than a weekly production in August. Saves water, time, and energy—and works on everything that the boiling water bath canner does. Second is the huge collection of jars, gathered from friends (Bicentennial canning jars!), Goodwill, and the grocery store over the years. Supplies are in the basement all the time. Third are two books— The Joy of Pickling and The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. Between the two, whatever I bring home is covered, and Linda Ziedrich’s  discussions of technique and theory are clear and detailed as well. 

            I rode home today loaded with twenty pounds of very ripe tomatoes—the box that no one would buy because they were so ripe and no one at the farm had time to process in the next twenty four hours. I resisted the tiny plums, but did my best to sell them to another woman who was picking up some peppers. Right now, the first round is steaming cheerfully in the canner, the second round is roasting in the oven, and the third round is de-stemmed and waiting to be sliced and arranged on trays. This winter, we will eat them is soups and on pizza and pasta, bringing back hot summer days. Now I just need to find something to do with the zucchini.

Roasting Tomatoes

Gather a bag of paste tomatoes. Slice each in half and lay on a cookie sheet face down. Cover the tray. Place in a 350 degree oven. Roast until wilted and perhaps a bit charred. Slide into half pint jars, cap, and process for twenty five minutes in the steam canner.