Tennessee Locavore

Your Mother Was a Hamster!

My husband and I share a love built on mutual understanding, respect and a deep and abiding love for Monty Python. 

He came late to this love.  On October 19, 1991, Marcus was on a University of Tennessee band bus headed home from Birmingham, Alabama.  A cloud of gloom had settled over everyone - if there's one thing that native Knoxvillians loathed in the 1990s more than anything else, it was being a Volunteer fan who's team has just lost to the Crimson Tide.  Into the depths of despair came a bright light emanating from the TVs on the bus.  Marcus was lying there, half asleep in his chair and he looks up to a movie where a one armed Black Knight is yelling "I've been hurt worse". It was so bizarre, yet so giddily funny that he couldn't turn away.

My love for Monty Python came from my father.  My Dad is a dork but I mean that in the best, most lovable kind of way.  At the age of 16 though, he was just annoying - mainly because he existed and he was my dad.  A sixteen year old's scorn has no bounds.  He watched the weirdest movies and thought the most inane things were funny.  But one day I came into the room when he was watching a movie and heard this "I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries." I mean, how could you not love a movie like that?

Since then, I've had a strange fascination with Monty Python and elderberries in particular.  I've been thinking about planting them in my yard just so I could taste them.  If we traveled to any out of town farmers markets, I looked for them.  I bought a blouse once because the catalog color was elderberry.  If my husband and I are fighting, all one of us to say to diffuse it is to insult the other by telling them that their mother was a hamster and that their father smelt of elderberries.

We were at the Market Square farmers' market a few weeks ago and one of my favorite farmers had a basket full of the most vivid, yet delicate looking berries I had very seen.  If lace was turned into berries, those berries were what it would look like.  I'm a sucker for anything novel at the market so I asked him what they were.  When he told me "Elderberries" I swooned.  And promptly bought four pounds.

I got home, spread a sheet on the couch, popped in Monty Python's Holy Grail and proceeded to strip berries off the stems.  FOR THREE HOURS!!! 

They're such gorgeous berries though and I wish I could make a lipstick out of them.

Four pounds of berries gave me roughly 2 cups of juice.  Be careful with this stuff.  When I got done, it looked like I had massacred an alien with deep fuchsia blood in parts of my kitchen.  To extract the juice, I put the berries in medium saucepan with a quarter cup of sugar and a half cup of water.  I turned the heat on medium and brought everything to a boil and let it simmer for five minutes.  Then I used a sieve to drain the juice.  If you want perfectly clear jelly, don't do what I did which was to push the berries to extract every last bit of juice.  I was more concerned with having enough juice to make the jelly.

I tasted the juice after it was extracted and immediately got very nervous because there was a strong, bitter component to it.  I almost cried at the thought of all that work being for naught.  My husband suggested that I had nothing left to lose but a bit of sugar so why not see if it that made it taste alright.  I've never had this happen before but as soon as I added enough sugar, the bitterness went almost completely away and I can't taste it in the finished product at all. 

I love this jelly.  It's the most vibrant, glistening shade of purple I think I've ever seen.  It's delicious on scones and right at home in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I'm going to be on the lookout for an easier way to extract the juice but as long as I can find elderberries, I'll be making this jelly every year.

In fact, I think it's time to finally order those bushes and plant them in the yard!

Monty Python Jelly
Adapted from the Pomona Pectin blackberry jelly instructions

Note - I made this jelly using Pomona Pectin.  It's become my go-to pectin to use in most of my canning and I love the fact that low sugar jams are cinch with it!

2 cups elderberry juice
2.5 tablespoons lemon juice
2.5 cups sugar (use more or less depending on how sweet you like your jelly-this includes the 1/4 cup of sugar used earlier)
2 teaspoons pectin powder
2 teaspoons calcium water

Measure the juice into a pan with lemon juice. Add calcium water into mixture and stir well.  Measure sugar into a bowl and mix pectin powder into it.  Bring juice to a boil, add the pectin sugar mixture and stir vigorously one to two minutes to dissolve the pectin.  Taste for sweetness and add more sugar if needed.  Return to boil.  Once it comes to a boil, remove from heat.  Fill jars.  If canning, please follow rules for canning jellies & jams from Ball Blue Book or Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

For printable recipe, click here!

It's Fall, isn't it?

This is the time of year when a food lovers thoughts turn to apples, potatoes, roast pork and gorgeous winter squashes.  After all, Fall starts tomorrow and all the food magazines are publishing gorgeous spreads of food featuring hearty autumn fair.  It's time to make rich stews and bake apple pies and snuggle up with your significant other in thick cable knit sweaters in front of a roaring fire.  

If I tried snuggling in front of an roaring fire right now, I'd pass out from heatstroke.  I live in Tennessee and while the temperatures have cooled down some, days in the low to mid 80s and evenings in the low to mid 60s don't exactly cry out for chili. In fact, right now is when our gardens tend to be producing the most.  If our plants have survived the dog days of summer, the cooler temperatures are encouraging our tomatoes to actually set fruit.  And the lack of high 90 degree heat actually encourages me to get back outside and reclaim the garden I gave up a few weeks ago.  The peppers are full of blossoms and the second crop of cucumbers and squash I planted are starting to set fruit.

Even when the leaves have turned, it doesn't mean our gardens stop producing.  I get tomatoes well into October and I've even heard tales of some crazy people (present company excluded of course) who have draped their tomatoes with plastic clamped together with large binder clamps and managed to keep their tomatoes going well into November.

The farmers markets are still full of summer produce.  You can find everything from okra to watermelon.  Peppers are still in abundance and the only thing that seems to be in scarce supply are cucumbers and summer tree fruits.  Apples are available and sweet potatoes and winter squash are starting to appear.  Jerry's got new cornmeal and sweet Fall broccoli will appear in a few weeks.

September is the month I really focus on getting a lot of foods preserved and put up for the coming winter.  I don't have air conditioning in my kitchen and although I do have to attempt some canning in August, standing over a steaming kettle is not my favorite thing to do when it's blazing out.  I end up freezing a lot of tomatoes whole and dealing with them when it's a little cooler.

My favorite way to use those tomatoes that are piling up in the freezer is in Roasted Tomato Sauce.  It's a great way to take a mountain of produce and reduce it into a concentrated sauce that's my favorite pasta sauce in the whole world.  I pressure can mine but it also freezes well.  The long cooking concentrates the flavors and caramelizes all the wonderful sugars in this sauce.  My husband has been known to can it himself because he says if I do it, I end up eating half of it before it's even canned.  

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to run Office Depot for some (cough, cough) office supplies. I hear the binder clips are on sale and everyone can always use more binder clips, right?

Roasted Tomato Sauce

First off - you need to understand that this recipe is very flexible.  None of these quantities are set in stone.  If you have tons of red peppers, use them!  If you want a sauce with a lot of garlic flavor, add lots of extra garlic.  You're also going to need to be flexible with time.  If you start out with frozen tomatoes, it will obviously take longer.  If I have a lot of tomatoes, as the sauce cooks down, I add in more frozen tomatoes to make more sauce.  This slows down the cooking process as well.

Heat your oven to 425 degrees.  I take a large baking or roasting pan and fill it full of tomatoes. Some of these are fresh and some of them are tomatoes that I threw in the freezer to deal with later.  I added three onions that were peeled and quartered, a few sweet red peppers that I seeded and cut in half, four Big Bomb hot peppers that were seeded and approximately 25 cloves of garlic - separate the cloves but you don't need to peel these.  Then drizzle on 1/4 cup of olive oil.  Put it in the oven.

This batch contained 10 pounds of tomatoes:
 

I couldn't fit all the tomatoes in at the start so I added them as the sauce cooked down.  I usually stir this sauce about every 30 minutes.  After a couple of hours, the sauce looks like this:

As you can see, the skins are getting very brown.  Keep stirring every 30 minutes.  This sauce is going to reduce quite a bit.  Those ten pounds of tomatoes and other vegetables ended up reducing to about five cups once it's been pureed.  When it's done, it will look like this:

As you can see, there's very little juice in the bottom of the pan.  I cooked the above pan of sauce for 4 1/2 hours.  Let the pan cool for about 30 minutes or until you can handle it without burning yourself.  You want to put it all through a food mill on the finest setting.  This will take all the seeds and skins out of your sauce and puree all the vegetables together.  Once you've put it through the food mill, make sure to stir the sauce thoroughly.  If you don't have a food mill, you could use a fine sieve and press it through. 

The sauce you've just made is very concentrated.  For two servings of pasta, we usually use around a 1/4 cup of sauce, diluted with pasta water.  

Now that you have this stuff, what do you do with it?

• Toss with pasta and some of the pasta water to thin it out a bit and serve.
• Saute some eggplant, red peppers and zucchini until done.  Add sauce and thin with pasta water.
• Thin it out with a little bit of milk or cream.
• Thin it out with red wine and add some more herbs to it.
• Soak some diced, sun-dried tomatoes (I use ones I've marinated before drying) in a half cup of hot whole milk.  Puree in the blender and add to roasted tomato sauce.
• Puree it with a little bit of canned tomato and use it as a pizza sauce.  Or just thin with a little bit of water and use as a pizza sauce.

I pressure can my sauce in quarter pint jars.  This is not a tested recipe so I don't recommend following my example but I follow the recipe for pressure canning meat sauce in the Ball Blue Book.  This sauce cooks down so much that freezing is much simpler to do.  I just tend to have stuffed freezers this time of year so I can it to save room.

For printable recipe, click here!

Tips and Resources I Use for Local Eating

A few weeks ago, a few of my fellow Knox Vegas residents emailed me to let me know that they were interested in some resources for local eating.  This post contains a few local market reviews but I hope the other information is helpful to the rest of my readers.  Please jump in and post in the comments if you have any other helpful resources.

Marcus and I first started trying to eat local about seven years ago.  At the time, this wasn't an easy thing to do.  Our "official" farmer's market had been turned into a discount food store.  The one actual farmer's market was located out in West Knoxville in a church parking lot where it got so hot that we actually saw people pass out when we were there.  There were very few organic growers and I can remember a farmer screaming at me when I asked him if he grew anything without chemicals.  "Don't you know that you can't grow anything around here without chemicals?" he told me snidely and when I asked him how our grandparents managed to do it, he tried to convince me that farmers everywhere had been using petrochemicals on their crops since this nation was founded. Needless to say, it was quite the experience.  Trying to buy free range beef meant taking out another mortgage on your home so you could afford it.  Fruit and vegetable resellers ran rampant.  There's nothing like seeing a "farmer" selling produce out of a box labled 'Florida Tomatoes'.

Compared to those times, It's a lot easier now.  Knoxville has never really been on the forefront of trends.  I joke around that we're about 15 years behind Seattle but the local foods movement is picking up steam.  We now have a farmer's market every day of the week, except Sunday and Monday.  More and more farmers are growing organically so there's a lot more choices available to consumers.  I now see local chefs at our downtown market on a regular basis and I'm hoping that the Three Rivers Co-op move will give them more space to expand their local offerings.

I'm not a local foods expert.  I think it's such a huge concept that no one person can really consider themselves an expert unless they devote the bulk of their time to it.  But it is a big part of my life and it's gotten to the point where so many of the choices that I had to think about at the beginning, now just come naturally to me.  This isn't a comprehensive post by any stretch of the imagination - it's just a post to help those starting out on the local foods bandwagon.

Tips for Eating Local:

Tip #1 - Just Try
The first tip I can offer is just to try.  Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.  Start by deciding to eat as seasonally as you can.  Start by trying to eat one local meal a week.  Start by taking a food that you often buy and pledge to buy that food locally. Start with one small thing and make that a habit before you do anything else.  That's how we got to the point where we are now.  We started by eating seasonally and buying as much produce as we could at local farmer's markets.  Then we started substituting local beef for one meal a week.  We increased that and started trying to eat mainly local fruit.  Then we searched out local grains and ventured into canning.  Little steps add up.  Making our own bread, canning our produce, dehydrating stuff from our garden, eating seasonally and locally is so second nature that for the most part, it's easy.  

Tip #2 - It's Not a Competition
 A word of warning - don't get caught up in the competitive aspect of it - I'm only saying this because I'm guilty of it. I participate in a blog challenge were everyone agrees to cook one local meal a week.  When I first started, I felt a little embarassed by some of the other participants meals - stuff with local olive oil, flours.  I decided then that I was going to eat the localest local meal that ever localed.  Needless to say, this is completely against the whole idea of the challenge which is to make local eating more of a part of your everyday life. 

Tip #3 - Adjust Your Menus & Shop Your Farmers' Markets
You're going to need to adjust the way you cook as you get more into local eating.  I used to plan out my meals for the week, write a shopping list and go to the store.  Now I head to the market, buy what looks good and then figure out my meals for the week.  That's where cookbooks based around the season and recipe sites that show recipe by vegetable come in really handy.

One of the best ways you can start eating more local foods is by going to one of the local farmers' markets in the area.  It's the best way to get an idea of what's in season.  You'll learn that when local corn is at the market, you buy it.  You can begin to understand that eating locally in Tennessee means that salads in the summer will need to consist of something besides lettuce.  You'll learn that the tomatoes available in late June have nothing on the tomatoes that will arrive later.  You'll learn that fall broccoli is almost always sweeter than spring broccoli and that some kinds of winter squash taste like chestnuts.

Tip #4 - Challenge Yourself
Challenge yourself by doing something fun and/or weird!  Last year I made cheese.  Seriously - I was so pleased with myself that it was ridiculous.  I got major bragging credo on that accomplishment alone.  I was able to serve a roasted vegetable sandwich with homemade bread, homemade cheese and vegetables from our garden.  I was so proud of that.  Another example - I've never been a big baker but about a year ago, when the bakery that made our favorite peasant bread shut down, we tried making no-knead bread.  It was so easy and so good that we've never gone back to buying bread.  I've also developed a newfound interest in baking that I might never have had without the satisfaction that I got from baking that first loaf.  Buy a vegetable that you've never seen before.  Just do something different and see what happens 

Tip #5 - Enlist the Help of Your Family & Friends
Talk to your friends and family about local options.  One of our neighbors had a sourdough starter that she's had for years.  She was nice enough to let me have some.  I posted on the blog about a search for local flour and someone emailed me with information that might help me track some down.  I grow lots of different tomato varieites each year and I share how they do with my farmer friends.  Get your friends and family together for a local potluck once a month - encourage one another.

Tip #6 - Sometime There Will Be Setbacks
A few years later, Marcus and I decided to only eat local fruit that year.  That was the year that we had one of the warmest springs on record, followed by several nights in the high teens.  We managed to save our strawberries by covering them with plastic and putting lights under there with them, but farmers in the area were hit hard - some of them went out of business because of it.  All the tree fruits lost their blossoms that yea,r along with all the berries that needed to flower on the previous year's wood.  We ate a lot of melon that year.  This year, farmers all over the Northeast lost their entire tomato crop to late blight.  Farming is hard, uncertain work and if you pledge to support your local farmers, you'll have to find workarounds when they encounter setbacks.

Market Reviews:

There are three local farmer's markets that I know of in Knoxville.  I've been to the one in Oak Ridge some time ago and enjoyed it but since I live close to downtown, I don't go to many of the markets in the surrounding area.

Market Square - this is the market that I'm at every Saturday morning. This is the market where Marcus and I sell heirloom tomatoes every spring.  I'm very biased towards this market because I've been a part of its community since the day it started.  I've felt like a proud parent as I've watched it grow over the years.  I trust the farmer's here to tell me how they grow their food. I've watched their kids grow up and we've shared recipes and garden tips.  Saturdays from 9-2, Wednesdays from 11-2

Knoxville Farmers' Market in Sequoyah Hills - This is a very nice market and they tend to have a little more choice than the market downtown.  However, you're going to pay for that choice. I hesitate to say this because I may make a few people angry but there a few reasons why I don't like this market better.  I don't like that they market themselves as the REAL farmer's market.  I've been turned off because a few times I've gone and I've seen hybrid tomatoes marketed as heirlooms, probably to get a premium price.  I've dealt with line jumping and pushing here as well.  However, some of the same farmer's that sell at Market Square sell here.  I also visit here at least once a month to buy beef or chicken from Laurel Creek Farms and they're good people. Tuesdays & Fridays 3-6pm

New Harvest Park Farmers' Market - I'm ashamed to say I've never been to this market.  With our garden pumping out produce and my visits to my main stay market, I just haven't gone.  I hope to get there before the season ends and when I do, I'll post an update. Thursday 3-6pm

Cookbooks I use:

One of the best helps for me has been to make sure that my cookbook collection contains as many cookbooks in it that make local, seasonal eating easier. These are all cookbooks I either own or check out from the library all the time.  I'm sure there are other helpful books - please let me know in the comments below!

These cookbooks are arranged around seasons:
Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets 
A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friends 
Fresh Food Fast: Delicious, Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour

These are all-purpose cookbooks but I find them all very helpful:
Passionate Vegetarian
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food

If you want to try preserving, here are some great books:
The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round 
Ball Blue Book of Preserving
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving 
The Joy of Pickling

These are the books that have inspired me to eat locally:
This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader - this is the book that first got me interested in local eating.  It's a fun read and makes you think without being preachy.
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life 
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food

Recipe Sites Online:

There are tons of recipe sites online that I love but these sites in particular are very helpful when you're trying to figure out how to cook the strange vegetable you bought at the market.

Mariquita Farm
Live Earth Farms
Nobel Foods Farm
Green Earth Institute

The list of blogs that I read that talk about local foods is really too extensive for this post.  I'll try to feature some of them over the next few months because they've helped me a lot.

Local eating is the way I support my local businesses and neighbors.  It's the way I show that I honor the hard work that farmers have to do to stay afloat.  It's the way I It's also the way I show the food companies that I don't like the way they do business and I won't support them.  The less money I spend on their food, the less money they have to fund campaigns that try to convince us that Froot Loops are healthy.

Last but not least, let me know if any of you would be interested in a local foods potluck every couple of months. I'd be more than happy to host it at my house as long as you promise to ignore the never ending cycle of renovations that would surround us.  My kitchen is a disaster (those of you who live here with me in ONK will appreciate how difficult cooking in old kitchens can be) but I'd love to plan a canning get together next year if any of you want help getting started canning.

PS - Thanks for the help from the Twitter community.   Marsula, KitchenMage, EatLocalChall & SweetSavoryLife all weighed in with helpful tips.  Please check out their blogs.  I enjoy all of them.

One Local Summer - Week Ten

The idea of eating locally being difficult this time of year makes me laugh, especially when I would really have to work to eat a mainly non-local diet.  It's been pretty hot here so most of our meals have been of the non-cooked variety - like salads or sandwiches.  We've had a lot of watermelon and feta salads, scads of BLTs, and I made mayonnaise with local eggs that was so good we made a meal of steamed vegetables just dipped in it.  If you had ever told me that I would enjoy a meal that consisted mainly of mayo, I probably would have laughed at you.  But homemade mayonnaise with a little garlic added is heaven.

When I do cook, I try to cook something that will last us for several meals.  This week, I made a huge pork roast with meat from River Ridge Farms.  I served it with tortillas made with homemade lard rendered from local pork fat and two types of salsa - both from my garden.  We have a bumper crop of tomatillos this year so I made a roasted tomatillo salsa with local onions and garlic and added hot peppers and cilantro from our garden.  The other salsa was a grilled tomato salsa with a bunch of heirloom tomatoes from our garden. 

The only thing I haven't been able to escape from is canning.  Nothing heats up an un-air conditioned kitchen quicker than canning.  I don't really have a choice though because this is the time of year that everything is ripe.  I made several pints of plum jam and took some frozen sour cherries and made black forest jam and cherry chutney.  I made a deal with a local farmer and he gives me his "ugly" tomatoes and I can them and give him half.  Cracked tomatoes won't keep so yesterday I spent several hours canning them in a 91 degree kitchen.  I also got my hands of some elderberries and made some gorgeous elderberry jelly.

I'm not going to lie.  There are times I wonder why the hell I do this stuff?  When I'm standing over a boiling water canner, it seems so much easier to just buy canned tomatoes or jam. But come winter, there is such a feeling of satisfaction in knowing exactly where my food is coming from.  I also like remembering the farmers I bought from in the summer during a time when it seems like winter will never end. Those little jars remind me that summer abundance will come again, no matter how dark or dreary the days seem.

Cherries up the wazoo!

This past week, we've picked over 20 pounds of cherries.  Picking them in the easy part.  I never remember in my zeal for picking them that we will have to process all of them which is not quite as much fun.  I try very hard not to buy too many specialized gadgets but I will be buying a cherry pitter for next year.  If you don't have a cherry pitter, you can make due with a paper clip that's been bent into a 'S' shape.  Bend the botton curve up a tiny bit and insert it into a cherry at the stem end.  Pie cherries are much easier to pit but do this outside in old clothes.  Once pit, you can freeze the cherries, can them or dry them.  It was so hot this past week that the thought of spending a couple of hours over a hot, steamy stove made me feel faint.  So we froze most of the cherries.  We did dry some of the pie cherries and I really liked how they turned out.  I think they'll be amazing in muffins and recipes this fall.  We use a dehydrator - it gets rather humid here so this is the easiest way to dry stuff for us.  We dried several pie cherries plain and they're tasty.  Very tart but still good.  The other recipe was more like the Craisins you buy in the store.  We're going to pick a few more pounds next week to dry this way.

Cherry 'Craisins'
2 cups pitted pie cherries
1/2 cup sugar

Combine in saucepan and let sit for ten minutes.  Bring to a boil over medium heat and boil for one minute.  Remove from heat and let cool.  Strain and dry cherries.

Do NOT throw the leftover cherry juice out.  It makes the most amazing cherry limeades ever - we froze it ice cube trays to use later this summer.  I also plan to experiment with the amounts of sugar.  I think we could use a little bit more in the recipe.

I am now so in love with pie cherries that I'm going to figure out a way to put one in on my city lot.  Cherry juice is so amazingly wonderful but it gets a little pricey when it's made from cherries that are $2 a pound!

We froze the rest for canning later.  I plan on making several different kinds of jams and there's a chutney recipe that looks yummy.

Our convenience food

Tonight, Mark and I had our own fast food.  This summer, I spent time canning different things.  We've been trying them out all winter.  The pickled okra was fantastic and the Habanero Gold jelly was awesome.  The eggplant relish and curry pickles have been tasty too.  The pickles made with lemon juice?  Disgusting!  But it's been cool to have these things to depend on.  We tried a spaghetti sauce recipe and while it's not the recipe I'm searching for, it was really tasty.  And so easy - boil noodles, heat sauce and eat.  The noodles aren't local but the tomatoes, peppers, basil, oregano and garlic are from our garden.  The onions are from our local farmers market and the only non-local ingredients were olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I'm still on the lookout for the killer sauce recipe but even this 'merely good' recipe was tasty and fast.

Farmer's Market Goodies & putting them up

Jerry had some okra so I bought all that he had.  I was enough to fry up a little last night and I still had about 5 cups left to bland and freeze for gumbo this winter.  Last week I took some really woody okra pods I had and simmered them with some leftover tomato juice (anytime we had tomato juice that would make a recipe too watery, I poured it off of the chopped tomatoes and froze it).  Quite a bit of the okra flavor cooked into the juice and it will be awesome for gumbo.  So after blanching the okra, anything that seemed to woody got sliced up and stuck in the scrap bag with the okra stems.  I also bought another sweet potato squash from Jerry - the other one had a bad spot so I had to cook the whole thing but it's a pretty tasty squash so I want to buy a few more to store.  I also bought some more white sweet potatoes.  They are just like regular potatoes but with a sweet aftertaste.  They make the most amazing home fries.

JD had some gorgeous muscadines so we bought a pint.  He also had some of the cleanest, prettiest Jerusalem artichokes I'd ever seen.  I just saw a yummy recipe for Jerusalem Artichoke Bisque in a Deborah Madison cookbook so I got some.

Gary still has eggplants so I bought three of them.  I made some eggplant relish last week to can and it was really good.  I want to make another batch.

Today, I popped open a tiny jar of the Curry Pickle Slices!  I LOVE them!  I'm definitely making these next year.  I blanched the squash that I bought last Saturday.  I'd been putting off dealing with them but one had gone soft and it was put up or shut up time.  So I froze about ten cups.  They were a delight to work with after the snotty mess of okra.  I also had to deal with the huge mess of cucumbers I bought last week so Marcus and I made some pickles that used a combo of lemon juice and vinegar.  I need to use up the rest of the cukes and as much as I want to make more Curry ones, I'm going to try to try some non-sweet ones.  The goal this season is to try as many different recipes as possible so we can make larger batches of the great ones next year.  I also canned a pint of okra - I've never had pickled okra so what the hell!

Marcus was sweet enough to dice up the huge mess of red peppers sitting in the fridge that were about to go bad.  He sauteed them with some onions and garlic and threw in the tomatoes that were about to go bad as well.  I'm going to fuss with it tomorrow and freeze it for later this year.

More canning

So far today, we've made:
Curry Pickle Slices - 3 half-pint jars
Gazpacho Salsa - 2 pint jars
Jalapeno & Tomato Salsa - 6 half-pint jars

I hope to make some Madras Pickled Eggplant and put some tomatoes in to marinate before the night is over.

Quick catch up!

Things have been a bit crazy with my job so no updates lately but I'll try to be better.

The Habanero Gold is AMAZING!  Our jelly is a little too 'jelled' but the flavor is amazing so we'll definitely be making more.  Since the red bell peppers are getting a little scarce, I think I'll make it with some of the red Aji Dulce peppers and use a combo of the Lemon Drop peppers with the Habaneros.  We used some in some mango salsa we made and it worked great.  The mangos weren't the greatest and not juicy at all so I mixed in some of the HG and it worked really well.  And it's heaven on toast with cream cheese!

Last night we roasted a couple of pans of red bell peppers, peeled them and stuck them in small bags for the freezer.  I've got some cucumbers sitting in some salt tonight so we can make Curry Pickle Slices tomorrow.  And today we sorted through our garlic to see how much we'd have to plant and culled out the smallest bulbs to make pickled garlic with.  We put up 4 half cup jars today.

I've got several quart bags of hot peppers in the fridge so I'll need to put some of them up tomorrow.  Plus I've got more cukes to pickle and some zucchini to blanch!  Thank god there's no football game!  :-P

Habanero Gold

Hot 'N Sweet Confetti Jelly

1 cup minced dried apricots (1/8" dice)
1 1/4 total cups minced red sweet pepper & minced red onion (1/8" dice), approximately half-and-half.
1/4 cup Habanero peppers
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
6 cups sugar
1 3-oz. pouch liquid pectin

Prep apricots, peppers and onion. Place in a large, stainless or other non-reactive pot. Add sugar and vinegar. Bring to the boil and cook 5 minutes. Pull off the burner; allow to cool, cover and let sit overnight(or at least 4-6 hours). Stir occasionally if convenient.

Next day, bring the mixture back to the boil. Stir in liquid pectin. Boil hard 1 minute. Pull off the heat. If necessary, skim foam. Let cool 2 minutes, stirring to distribute solids. Pour into jars. Stir to distribute and remove air bubbles. Do the usual with the jars and lids, BWB 10 minutes.  When jars are sealed, "agitate" to distribute solids throughout the jelly.
Yield: 6 8-oz. jars.

ReadingLady from GardenWeb came up with the recipe which is the same recipe as Habanero Gold in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  It just makes a larger batch and uses the liquid pectin more efficiently because it's kind of pricey.  It's been soaking for a bit and I'll finish it up tonight or tomorrow.  It tastes fantastic though!  Habaneros really have an amazing flavor.  Of course that's followed by intense pain but they do taste wonderfully fruity before you die!  I tasted it and it's hot but not any hotter than other hot pepper jellies I've tried.  I think this is a lot more complex tasting too.  It's gorgeous!  Most of my jars are quilted so the effect won't be as pretty as completely clear jar but this is something you could give as a gift and be very proud of.  From what I've read, liquid pectin can be a bit finicky so I'll let you know how it sets up.

I got some sweet potatoes from Jerry along with another 10 pound winter squash.  We also bought two dozen eggs from him.  When it comes to eggs, I am spoiled rotten.  Farm fresh eggs have such an amazing flavor.  It's not overpowering - it just tastes more like an egg.  I had some regular eggs up at me parents a few weeks ago and they tasted so watery in comparison, with an almost metallic-like after taste.  I forgot what he said it was but I'll ask him later because I want to know in case it's crazy delicious.  Gary had yellow zucchini and he said it would probably be his last.  We also picked up a free range chicken and some Italian sausage from Dave of River Ridge Farms.

Canapalooza

More tomato goodness today!  As crappy as I felt and as hot as it was in our kitchen, it was either do something with the tomatoes or give them up to the hoards of fruit flies.

We made 6 pints of Annie's Salsa.  We originally were going to do this in a boiling water bath but we made a few changes to it so we felt safer pressure canning it.  The original recipe is in the link above but here's how we made it:

ANNIE’S ORIGINAL SALSA
8 cups tomatoes, peeled, chopped and drained
2 ½ cups chopped onion
1 ½ cups chopped green pepper
3 chopped jalapenos
1 chopped Fish Pepper
2 chopped Lemon Drop Pepper
6 cloves minced garlic
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp pepper
1 T canning salt
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup cider vinegar
16 oz. tomato sauce
10 oz tomato paste
Mix all ingredients, bring to a boil, boil 10 minutes. Pour into hot jars, process at 10 lbs of pressure for 30 minutes for pints. Makes 6 pints

We also made the Jalapeno Salsa from the Ball Book.  We ended up stewing a habenero in it and we removed it before canning it.  Our jalapenos all have very little heat.  We put another load of sundried tomatoes into the dehydrator as well.

Dealing with the tomatoes

We harvested about 10 more larger tomatoes today and figured out what's been eating them. One of the Kahlman's Hungarian Pinks had a perfect bite mark in it and it's obvious it's a possum. I'm willing to tolerate it's presence for now but it better keep eating whole tomatoes. If it starts taking bites out of a lot of them, I may not be so nice. The garden still looks like a wreck but with this wacky weather we've had, I'm not beating myself up over it. Plus, five minutes outside usually leaves me with about 15 mosquito bites. I'm going to have to suck it up soon though and spray on the DEET and get my butt in gear if I want to have even a small chance of more bush green beans - those seeds won't sow themselves.

I felt crappy today so I didn't make any salsa to can. I took the tomatoes which looked the worst and cut them up in the leftover marinade I saved from the sundried tomatoes I made the other day. I've already eaten about half of that batch so making them is an easy way to use up the ripest tomatoes. Tomorrow we have to defrost the chest freezer and make some salsa. Any leftover ripe tomatoes are getting thrown on the dehydrator to get super crispy. In the last issue of Organic Gardening, there was a recipe for tomato powder which is just really crispy tomatoes buzzed into dust in the food processor. I think this is a great way to use up tomatoes. I'm trying to avoid just throwing whole tomatoes into the freezer until I have no other choice. I still have a large bag of them from last year (which is inexcusable because I bought canned tomatoes this winter) so I think I'm going to cook them down in the crockpot until I have tomato paste which I'll freeze in an ice cube tray.

Spaghetti Sauce Recipe for canning

Chunky Basil Pasta Sauce
Source: Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard.
This makes 8 cups.

Ingredients
8 cups coarsely chopped peeled tomatoes -- (about 9-12 tomatoes or 4 lb/2 kg)
1 cup chopped onion
3 cloves garlic, minced
⅔ cup red wine
⅓ cup red wine vinegar (5 % strength)
½ cup chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon pickling salt
½ teaspoon granulated sugar
1 6-oz can tomato paste

Combine tomatoes, onion, garlic, wine, vinegar, basil, parsley, salt, sugar and tomato paste in a very large non-reactive pan. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 40 minutes or until mixture reaches desired consistency, stirring frequently.

If canning, remove hot jars from canner and ladle sauce into jars to within ½ inch of rim (head space). Process 35 minutes for pint jars and 40 minutes for quart jars in a BWB.

This tasted pretty good before canning so I'm curious to see how it tastes after a few weeks of mellowing.

Let the canning begin!

Here's what we made today:
4 pints of tomato basil sauce from Small Batch Preserving
A couple of trays of tomatoes in the dehydrator

Crockpot Ratatouille

I can't ever be reasonable and grow one variety of a vegetable. So I have 15 eggplants in one of my raised beds right now and there are 7 different kinds growing. I love eggplant but that's a bit much. In order to get rid of some of it, I decided to try a recipe for crockpot ratatouille I found online.

Ratatouille in the Crock Pot
8 servings

2 large onions, cut in half and sliced
1 large eggplant, sliced, cut in 2 inch pieces
4 small zucchini, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 large green bell peppers, de-seeded and cut into thin strips
2 large tomatoes, cut into 1/2 inch wedges
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
1 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
red pepper flakes, to spice it up

Layer half the vegetables in a large crock pot in the following order: onion, eggplant, zucchini, garlic, green peppers, tomatoes.
Next sprinkle half the basil, oregano, sugar, parsley, salt and pepper on the veggies.
Dot with half of the tomato paste.
Repeat layering process with remaining vegetables, spices and tomato paste.
Drizzle with olive oil.
Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 9 hours.
Place in serving bowl and sprinkle with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
Refrigerate to store.
May freeze up to 6 weeks.

I used several smaller japanese eggplants and red peppers instead of green ones. All of the veggies were from the garden with the exception of the zucchini. I bought those at the farmers market. The tomato paste wasn't local (I've got some frozen tomatoes from last year that I think I'll use to make some) nor was the olive oil or any of the dried herbs. I have those fresh herbs but I'm trying to use up some spices I have already. I cooked it yesterday but because we didn't put enough tomato paste in, it was kind of liquidy. I'm cooking it down a little more today. I'll let you know how it turns out.

"Sundried" Tomatoes

Since I live in the wonderful muggy state of Tennessee(although it's actually been too dry here this year), trying to dry produce in the sun isn't very effective. Luckily, I have a dehydrator and I love it. I cleared out all the kitchen gadgets we had and never used last year and a lot of stuff went to the Habitat thrift store. My dehydrator stayed. It's going to get a workout later today. I took a bunch of our cherry tomatoes (Sungolds & Black Cherry) along with some of our not so exciting regular tomatoes (Stupice & Mexican Beefstake) and sliced them up and threw them in to marinate for a few hours. Later, they'll get dried. I love this recipe - I tried it for the first time last year and I ate almost the whole batch within a couple of days. It's also a great way to save those tomatoes that have split but aren't quite ripe.

I got this recipe from Patris at Gardenweb:

Oven dried tomatoes
In large bowl combine:
1 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup Balsamic Vinegar
1 Tsp. Lemon juice
1/4 cup fresh chopped Parsley
1 Tbl. chopped Rosemary
Dried Pepper flacks to your taste, oppt.
Salt & Pepper to taste

Leave skin on and cut tomatoes in to bite size pieces. Take out any seeds. Place tomatoes in the mixture and refrg. for at least 2 hours. Set oven on lowest temp. Max. 200 degrees. Take tomatoes out of mixture and spread on cookie sheet. It's OK if they touch. They will need to Oven dry for about 14 to 16 hours. Size of pieces will determine time. I put mine in about 7pm and get them out the next morning around 10:30am.

I never bother to seed the tomatoes and I also add some smooshed garlic cloves to the marinade. I'll time the tomatoes I put in this afternoon and see how long they take to dry in the dehydrator.

Everything but the olive oil, vinegar, lemon, salt and pepper were from my garden.

Edited to add - I put these in at 8:15 last night and kept them going until about 9:30 this morning. Most of the cherry tomatoes were dry enough but some of the larger pieces were still too soft. Since this has so much oil in it, I store these in the freezer.