Has It Really Been FIVE Days?

Dear P.J.,

I believe in setting goals well in excess of my abilities. I'm still having trouble uploading videos to YouTube so please enjoy this official one from the Southern Draft Animals Days, which we attended last weekend.

;)

I've been a bit crazy running about getting things done this week. We're involved in several different (wildly so) events over the next month and I've got to get a whole lot of autumnal stuff completed before I head off for the first of them next week. Mr. Fuzzy always does a great job caring for the animals when I'm away but I do always hope to get things set up so it isn't total chaos for him. (See statement above.)

One of those "things" is canning, drying, and freezing bushels of late season produce. Our friend Bluebird gave us nearly 2 bushels of apples which I'm turning into sauce, chutneys and hot pickle. Then there's the miracle of the aubergines going on outside. We now have half a gallon of dried fruit. Doing all this in the house is rather a lousy proposition. The canner takes up half the stove and it's STILL in the low 80's here. So, I built a version of my friend Bob's 'movable' canning station using 6 dozen bricks and an old grate from a dead BBQ I spotted by the dumpsters. Works great, we burn the trash wood, and I get to play with fire.

Our wonderfully cranky, bachelor farmer neighbor has unexpectedly given us permission to pick fruit on his property, so I'll need to get that done and dealt with too. He has the best pears!

"Recipes are Common Property"

The kind lady who owns the Bobcat Bite in Santa Fe once said that to me when I asked for one of her signature recipes... "The World's Best Cole Slaw." You can have it too if you buy the book Hamburger America. (FYI Order the pork chops or the chilli if you want to look like a local.)

Now what was I saying??? Oh yes, recipes and cooking... my current occupation and lifelong obsession.

Laussanne, I bought the only dehydrator available in Floyd. It's a Back to Basics brand one and it does a pretty good job. It drys at 120 degrees F. more or less. Apples take about 12 hours with the humidity we've been having. Maybe next year I'll get a big fancy machine after I make Mr. Fuzzy do too much research on the things. They're bloody expensive!

Language Wench, you know I'd never deny you a good thing, so here's the recipe for Grammie Starbird's Vegetable Relish.

Ingredients
3 1/2 med-lg onions
1 small cabbage
5 large green tomatoes
6 green peppers
3 sweet red peppers
1/4 C pickling salt
---------------------------
3 C sugar
1 Tbsp mustard seed
1/2 T celery seed
7/8 tsp turmeric
2 C cider vinegar
1C water

Chop up the first set of ingredients, sprinkle with the salt, and let stand overnight. Rinse and drain. If you have a meat grinder, grind everything through the coarse plate. Add the 2nd set of ingredients. Boil 5 minutes. Fill hot, sterilized, jars to within 1/4 inch of the rim and process in boiling water 10 minutes + your altitude adjustment. Makes about half a gallon.

Don't do what I just did... forgot the water and vinegar. Now I'll have to try decanting the stuff, cooking it with the vinegar & water, and re-process. oh well. Should have quit the late night processing with the 13 pints of chutney.

Putting Up with Us, an update

Mmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm The cupboard is filling up fast but apparently our tastes are a little exotic based on questions we recently received while in Lexington, KY. Since maybe our good friend Baskethilt isn't the only person mystified by our list of preserves, I'll clarify what some of this stuff is.

Boozy Cherries are sweet cherries preserved in port --- a French recipe

Bottled Cherries are sweet cherries, mashed and canned without cooking --- also a French recipe. They have to be kept in the fridge until our cellar is dug.

Clover blossoms are a good tea for cough season. Mr. Fuzzy picked the red clover flowers and I air dried them.

Lilac jelly is made from lilac flowers. It's heartier than you might think and unlike many other flower jellies it doesn't taste like perfume.

Patipan is a kind of yellow fluted summer squash. Apparently there are parts of the country that don't grow them!

Ramp butter is an herb butter made with wild onions.

Rose petal jam is something I fell in love with when I traveled to the Republic of Georgia for music camp. It's best over museli with tart yogurt and lots of nuts and seeds... a winter favorite of mine. The syrup is really just the batch of jam that didn't set up properly.

Dried tomato paste is a wee experiment suggested my my new favorite kitchen book, Food Drying with an Attitude by Mary T. Bell. Although I love tomato dishes I rarely use even a tiny can of tomato paste before it starts to grow mold in the fridge so I just refrain from all those wonderful beefy,tomatoey, slow braised things I know I'd love. This book shows how to dry tomato sauces for backpacking but I thought.... "hey! Why not dry paste by the tablespoon???" The first drying is complete after a full day and it basically looks like miniature cow turds... but they smell nice.

I totally get it now when mothers of young children say they work all day and get nothing done.

I'm taking a much needed break from the kitchen to say "hello, I ain't dead!" So, um, Hello. I'm really very much alive and Mr. Fuzzy doesn't keep me shackled to the canner ALL day. (Just kidding honey.)

Having Young Master Rufus in the kitchen most of the day with me has really created a rhythm to getting things done. In the morning we play games like "down-stay-get treat" and "let's get all worked up and then calm down now." Then Mr. Fuzzy takes the wee lad up to the mailbox to get the mail and we play another round of "sit up vs down" before Rufus curls up in his kennel for a nap.

That's when I cut up vegetables and get the dehydrator humming. With all the moisture in the air these days it only gets a new batch once a day. (We've had several weeks where the low humidity was above 60% and one week where it never dropped below 75% water. Yuck!) When I'm done it's time for lunch which always wakes the dog up.

After lunch and a wee stand on the porch to confirm that the rest of the universe exists I take advantage of afternoon nap time. All eleven animals siesta at the same time so it's quite calm until three or four o'clock. This is when the canner and stove top gets going or I make up things for the freezer.

This year the canner is mostly dealing with fruit while the veggies are being dried. Next year I hope to have things in a more sane order which will allow me to branch out into pressure canning some vegetables. For now, the goal is to just get the food saved in whichever manner is most efficient and tasty. I will be attempting to can some tasty soups, baked beans, cakes, quick bread, and steamed breads once cold weather sets in and I can have the oven on all day.

Yes, you read that right. Canned cake and bread. Look here for the method.

So, back to my day these days. About 4 o'clock the first kitten awakes, comes crying for a cuddle, wakes the dog, and enjoys a game of "sit on the chair and whack the dog" before changing over to a game I call "race for the furthest exit and lie just beyond Rufus' nose." This is repeated five or six times over the next hour depending on the feline boredom level. If I'm smart, all the food is off the table and I'm doing dishes. Rufus is strangely calm if I'm washing up. Otherwise it's a game of tug or taking him down to the garden for an hour or two.

Then it's up again to make dinner followed by more of our morning amusements when Mr. Fuzzy and Rufus have returned from their romp. About 9 o'clock I declare a collapse and go read my herb books. Mr. Fuzzy recently gifted me American Household Botany: A History of Useful Plants, 1620-1900 by Judith Sumner and it's a great read.

That's what I've been up to of recent. Except last week where I got to meet my new (excellent) dentist, get yet another root canal, and discover that I'm exceptionally sensitive to nitrous oxide. I can wholeheartedly recommend the Doctors Huff DDS in Christiansburg, should you be in need of a dentist.

Sour Bramble Jam

For all you fans of Crafting With Cats here's a recipe to make up for all the ones you've been missing since I abandoned that blog. This recipe makes 6 to 8 cups of jam.

Mr. Fuzzy likes his blackberries sour so I came up with this recipe when he said my "very low sugar" recipe was way too sweet. (As in a 3:16 ratio instead of 1:1!) You'll need a large surface area pan to make this in less than 12 hours so I use our largest roasting pan set over two burners. Even then, plan to spend the day at home... it's worth it! Here's a good video tutorial series if you've never done any caning before. If you're impatient at least watch parts three and four.

Ingredients
1 gallon blackberries
1/4 cup bottled lemon juice*
a little water
1 1/2 cups 100% white grape juice concentrate
1 package "No Sugar Needed" dry pectin

Special Equipment
A pan with a large surface area
gallon stock pot
large pot of water for water canning
sauce pan
canning jars & lids (lids must be new!)
canning tools (funnel, lifter..)

*
Santa Cruz Organic, not the stuff in the plastic lemon!

Method

You can use fresh or frozen berries for this recipe. Picking your own and not being too particular about needing the most perfect, deep black, fat berries is a real help to getting this to be puckerlicious.

Measure berries, lemon juice and a little water ("more or less" is OK) and put into your stock pot. Heat until the berries produce juice... it won't take long. Now transfer to the big open pan. Turn up the heat to medium-high and stir occasionally to keep fruit from sticking. Add the grape juice concentrate, turn the heat down to a slow boil / simmer. Cook until the berries reduce by at least half but preferably until most of the liquid has evaporated.

Stir regularly while this is cooking down and don't be afraid to use the spoon to scrape up what's sticking to the bottom.... it'll incorporate nicely! If you have to walk away for a few minutes just turn the stove off and let the steam rise then turn the heat back on when you can watch the pot (while folding laundry or teaching your dog to roll over.)

Once the berries have cooked down nearly as far as you can stand to watch the pot... a few hours... start the water canner. You've got a couple gallons in there so it takes a while. I like to wash & put my jars in there as they need to be hot and should boil for 10-15 minutes to sterilize before filling anyway. Make sure the water comes 1" over the tops. Put the lids into the small sauce pan and add hot water. Simmer a couple minutes just before you're ready to fill the cans. This softens the sealing stuff and prevents shock.

Ok, now you're all set with your jars. You might have decided that this took WAY longer than expected and turned the heat off under your fruit goop for 15 minutes, which is perfectly OK. Bring it back up to a boil that doesn't fully abate when stirred and sprinkle the pectin over the entire surface of the fruit. Mix in quickly and let it come back to a boil for at least 1 minute. Turn off the heat.

Lift jars, fill to about 1/4" of the rim, cap them, and process 10 minutes (plus your altitude adjustment) in boiling water. Count the processing time from when the bubbles are steady, large, and burst at the surface. Carefully lift out and don't move those suckers until they are stone cold. Down here, the seal 'pops' closed in less than a minute but my recollection in Santa Fe was it could take hours.

Thanks for Putting Up with Us!

If you look over at the sidebar you'll see I've updated the tally on what we've "put up" off the farm so far in this, our first, year. Next year I hope to have more in the "dried" category but that nasty little moisture problem needs to be dealt with first. Thankfully, I've now got a handle on my every-time-the-barometer-moves-my energy-hibernates problem so I'll be better prepared for quickly dealing with the bounty NEXT year!!!! At least one stone has been cleared from that path!

Or, I guess, later this year if those beautiful tomatoes ever color up! We've not had enough sun in the last month to make the tomatoes turn red in any numbers. Well..... ANY number until yesterday. I can always make my Grammie Starbird's vegetable relish and lots of fried green tomatoes if I get impatient. What I really want is to make jars and jars of tomato sauce because we eat a lot of it in the winter.

So far we have a year's worth of jams, jellies, sauces, and pickles.... not too bad for a first try!

Outdoor Food Drying in Virginia

Hello beloved readers. Did you think I'd been crushed by a rabid zucchini?

The snap test indicated "not rabid" but those squashes do come on strong. Maybe five plants was a bit much? We had intended upon drying most of the surplus for use in winter soups and stews but we've run into a small problem known as "fog" and a larger problem called "rain" which sent our initial experiment of outdoor air drying into Boldy Moldy Land. At least it will feed the compost pile.

We have the greenhouse, which gets nice and hot this time of year, but it, too, has a little moisture problem when it rains. After much moving of clods previously known as "The Lawn" to the east side of the greenhouse to create a living sponge barrier, digging a trench to further divert runoff from the slope, and adding a whole lot of daylilies, red hot pokers, and a red Mystery Monocot we're almost ready to roll. (Or string, I suppose!)

Only problem now is to defeat the water that comes in the door. This might require adding a roof panel under the deck but I'm not sure. It's my next move and I do hope to God it works because otherwise I might give in and buy an electric dehydrator.

Until the moisture issue is resolved, the zukes and patty pans are keeping well on the counter for a week until we can eat them or give them to our few friends without gardens. We have an especially enthisiastic chiropractor "from the city" and a nurse neighbor who are happy to have them. (Thanks!)

Giant zuke, anyone?

Putting Up with the Fuzzies

No, I don't mean Mr. Fuzzy's anti-humor or Mrs. Fuzzy's housekeeping... I mean putting up food! Plans are in the works for a proper cellar but the lack of one has not stopped us from starting to preserve food for winter. I hear you saying...

"What on earth are you putting up, missy?
Your garden isn't even in yet!"

Well, if you look on the sidebar you'll see the preserving list and a list of edibles we've actually put in the ground. (There's a whole lot more waiting to go in as soon as I get those beds finished!) So far, the preserving has been little experiments to see how we like these new foods. Next year I'll make larger quantities.

Our farm is blessed with many native edibles, especially nuts, some of which Mr. Fuzzy collected in December. Having recently discovered two more food trees - chinquapin and paw paw - on our property means we're going to be putting on the miles and muscles gathering wild foods this autumn.

I've also been learning much of late about which garden flowers can be preserved. Somewhere I have a cookbook on the subject but it's all for fresh use. Got started late on this project but I did manage to make a little lilac jelly and I've got the first batch of rose petal jam started. There are tons of buds on the scented climbing rose so I expect to be making this every few days for a wee while. Enough, at least, to keep us in this manna. Maybe even plenty to share.