So! For the first post, I thought it would be neat to outline a project I just finished. I was going to comment on some of the crazy things going on politically, but I decided that this was way more worth it.
My mom's boyfriend, Paul, grew a vegetable garden in his backyard this year. Fortunately for us, his garden is producing way more food than he can eat on his own. So last week, he brought over piles of cucumbers. Although I love cucumbers, my favorite way to eat them is pickled. So I started looking up canning recipes for making pickles. I've never canned anything before, but my mom used to can peaches and applesauce when we lived in Seattle, so I figured it couldn't be too hard.
Turns out, it's incredibly easy!
I bought some mason jars and some pickling spices from the grocery store. I used Mrs. Wages Kosher Dill pickling seasoning, because I read that it was the best, and I'm a believer now!
So this is what I started with:
The cucumbers he picked were a little big for pickling, so I cut them into spears. I heated up the seasoning and vinegar in my mom's crock pot and started filling jars.
Paul also brought over enough stuff to make salsa, which, personally, I think is the best condiment ever. I found a great recipe on the Bell jar's website (I'll edit later and include the link) for zesty salsa. Paul brought over tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, banana peppers and cayenne peppers. I also used some bell peppers, onions and garlic that we got last Saturday from the farmer's market. I had to buy cilantro, as well. The salsa was just as easy as the pickles, only it took more chopping.
Here's what the salsa looked like at the end of chopping.
Mmm, doesn't that look good?
When it was time to process all these jars of food, I received the unfortunate news from my mom that she had no idea where her canning pot or rack was. So the first batch of pickles I made were refrigerator dills. They didn't get processed, we just put them in the fridge, waited a day, and started munching.
The second batch of pickles I did process. The next day, Paul brought over MORE cucumbers and jars and seasoning. This time, he didn't just have the Mrs. Wages' Kosher Dill mix. He brought pickling lime and pickling spice. It was a much longer process. I had to soak the cucumbers in lime and water for a few hours, then rinse them and soak them in ice water for a few hours, then soak them in the spices/sugar/vinegar syrup for a few more hours, then boil them in the syrup and THEN it was time to can. We didn't realize until the very end that we were making sweet pickles instead of dill pickles! Oops! Fortunately, even though no one in this house likes sweet pickles, one of my friends does, so we are going to feed him sweet pickles.
Then I did some more reading in my mom's Joy of Cooking book (lifesaver!) and found a way to can without having a canning pot. The trick is just to use a large pot of water and put a towel at the bottom of the pot to make sure the jars don't break. It worked really well! I didn't have one jar break.
I followed the recipe that was on the back of the seasoning back for boiling/processing times.
Then it was time to wait! I was so impatient waiting to hear the "ping" that told me my food had successfully canned and didn't need to be thrown into the refrigerator. It took longer than I thought it would, closer to half an hour, but they all sealed!
These are the sweet pickles and the first batch of salsa! I'm so excited to start eating that salsa.Overall, we made 24 quarts of pickles, and 10 pints of salsa.
I wanted to do this project for two reasons. First of all, my mom and I have been just overwhelmed by vegetables this summer. We subscribed to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and have been getting more veggies than we can eat every week. Plus, Paul brings food over from his garden at least once a week as well. It's been really tough to try to eat it all, and then we feel bad for throwing it away. Although, we don't really throw it away, we feed it to our compost pile, so it's a little better. So all of this food I just canned means that we can have homemade pickles and salsa all fall and winter, even after Paul's garden stops producing and the CSA season ends. Second of all, I am really trying to learn how to live more sustainably, and more self-sufficiently. I would never make it living up in the mountains, without a grocery store nearby. I feel like after the organic farming class I took my last semester of college, learning to preserve food is the next step in learning to be self-sufficient. And it was so much easier than I thought it would be. I have never canned anything before, I had no idea what I was doing, and with a few minutes of searching on the internet, and reading some passages in my mom's Joy of Cooking, the project was a complete success.
So next time you are thinking of doing a project and you don't think you know what to do, just remember that experience is the best teacher!
