Local Diet - July's bounty

Peas, it usually starts with the peas. Four pounds yields about 4 to 5 x 1 cup servings. It's an easy task, just sit and talk and shell pea pods. Then scoop into snack sized freezer baggies and done.

We find that 10 baggies gets us through January to May nicely, since there are just the two of us and so much else in the freezer to tempt us.

Sometimes the strawberries happen before the peas, this year they were at the same time. Steve made up a triple batch this summer. Two for us, one for the kids to split. I think it made 13 jars. And despite that astonishing number of strawberries to clean and prepare, it took less than two hours.

We bought too many and decided to dry a few trays.

Steve likes the dried strawberries in scones, crumbles, and granola. I'm not a strawberry fan, but apparently, yum yum is the word.

Natasha and I made two batches of jelly yesterday. These are so sonically easy! On the left is Cider-Spice Jelly and on the right is Honey-Lemon Jelly. Natasha and I will share these with Phoebe. The honey-lemon jelly is more or less water, sugar, honey and lemon combined with pectin. It sounds like just the thing for flu season. The Cider-Spice just sounded right for winter nummies. It is even easier; cider, spices, water, sugar and pectin. We imagine it going on pork or warm bread, ice cream, scones, sauce over vegetables. Maybe I'm wishful thinking here. We'll see.

Blueberries are up now. We still have some frozen from last year, because we forgot the kids weren't around any longer and froze enough for gadzillions of pancakes and scones. Steve bought one box and made one batch of jam.
I used four cups of the blueberries and made Blueberry-Maple-Pecan Conserve. It sounds and looks so delicious. The magazine showed the conserve on a baked brie, which is decadent. I am imagining it for deserts and appetizers. I am hungry already.

Preserving made easy

I just bought this magazine

I rarely do impulse buying, unless it involves chocolate or fabric. But this one hollered at me. I love looking at recipies for canning and jamming although I'm not so good on the follow-through. This magazine has great recipes, small quantities for preparation so it won't kill me and (here's the part I really like) suggestions on what to do with the preserves once they are done.
What I really like is that the recipes are grouped into major content of jar. Berries, rooted vegetables, citrus fruits and so on. In the index, the recipes are grouped by kind; salsa, chutney, jam etc.

A jar of pickled green beans merely stares at you accusingly, doesn't it? As a vinegar hater, the cry of the pickled anything falls upon deaf ears. But this magazine has links to Better Homes and Gardens (the publisher) and recipe suggestions. Chop up several pickled somethings and toss into a tuna salad. Oh yes, that is a good idea.

Take a look at these onions ! (Sorry Natasha, avert your eyes). Are they not amazing looking? Who would have thought of a) preserving onions and b) tossing them around like that?

Here is YOUR opportunity to be creative and help avoid buying imported fresh fruits in the winter when blah blah blah. You've heard it all before and thought, "good idea, I must do something about this" Here's your easy pickings chance.

Option One: The easy way to preserve - find someone who does it for a living.

Think of something that you buy in the winter and, naughty you, know you shouldn't. What about peaches or strawberries? What about kiwi or apricots? What about fresh peas!? Oh my God, fresh tomatoes !! are you listening?

Decide on a vegetable or fruit or both that you could change your buying habits about, and instead, buy a jar of preserves from someone. Just one. Small steps remember. On your calendar, chose a date mid-winter and write down "Open the bloody jar of preserves so Laureen will a) stop whining and b) feel satisfied she has changed your life.

Serve the jar as it is, or go hunting to bhg.com for a recipe. There are a gazillion things to do with jam besides put it on toast or make thumbprint cookies.

We go to Pat's Preserves at the Market

http://patspreserves.wordpress.com/

We are partial to his corn relish, two kinds of great pickles, hot pepper jelly, rhubarb jam and applesauce cake which is amazing for camping or times when you are too busy to make a desert for those expecting one. I have also looked at the preserves on the shelves at Bob and Boys on Hwy. 103, around exit 15 and that preserving maniac has the most amazing mustard pickles and a blueberry rhubarb jam that looks very good.

Option two: Harder but not impossible, in fact, a chance for some fun.
Buy the magazine from above. I found it at Soeby's on Queen Street on the impulse magazine rack.
Open it up, have a napkin in hand to stop up your drooling and choose one recipe. There is a cider jelly that looks very easy and scrumptious. No fruit or veg to clean, just cider and pectin and few other bits. Have a go at it and see how simple it really is.

Fruit cocktail, peaches and sustainability

Fruit Cocktails, Peaches and Sustainability

Lovely peaches and pears are available in Nova Scotia right now. Get those local peaches while you can, they go fast. The peaches come from the Annapolis Valley and are small and fuzzy and cling to the pit, but they are worth the work to eat or preserve. We get great pears as well and now is the time to make fruit cocktail.

The second most important ingredient for making fruit cocktail or canning peaches is the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving. I spent the winter going through cookbooks and books specializing in canning and jamming etc. and generally the recipes in the Bernardin book are the core recipes in other resources. The amount of cinnamon or pickling spice might change here and there but overall, these recipes are fool proof. And I am a fool. I haven't messed any up yet. Visit their site at www.homecanning.com/can to see what's cooking.

OK, here we go.
Canning fruit cocktail:
Buy 5 pears, 8-10 peaches, realize that local grapes won't be ready for a few weeks yet and decide to substitute in blueberries. This has interesting consequences. 1 cup of maraschino cherries are needed but these will never be local. Having read the recipe a few weeks earlier, I bought some local cherries and tried to keep them fresh in the crisper. I pulled out any bruised or moldy ones every few days and as good luck would have it, I had a little more than a cup when the other fruit was ripe. If you can't get cherries, strawberries will do. Some late bearing berries are now available.

Next, go out side and put all your garden furniture and potted plants into the shed because Hurricane Bill is coming in a day. Back in the kitchen, clean all the fruit and realize something called Fruit-Fresh is required. This is ascorbic acid. What is that? Turns out it is vitamin C and once I clued into that, I remembered that one cookbook suggested crushing vitamin C tablets and mixing them with water and pouring the mix over the cooked fruit. It works. Nothing turned brown and now my fruit cocktail and canned peaches have extra vitamin C in them.

Follow all Bernardin instructions regarding cooking times, canning times, levels of fruit in the jar and so on. Truly, if you read the instructions (which I hardly ever do until it is too late) you can not go wrong. I recommend wearing your glasses when reading recipes. I often forget which recipe is on which side of the page and find I am on the path to making sour krout instead.

What the recipes don't give you is a sense of time. How long does it all take. Well, a good chunk as it turns out. Peaches are a bugger to clean if they aren't ripe and if they are too ripe, they have the opposite problems. Under ripe and the skin won't peel, even if you boil the whole peach and then rinse in cold water. Stubborn is the word. If they are too ripe, then the flesh peels off with the skin. So you want a moderate peach. One with a bit of give to its flesh, but not firm. If you can't find anything soft enough, then let them sit on the counter for a day or too to reach a nice squish.

Fruit flies – are inevitable. They are already in your home, you may not have noticed but they are. As soon as the fruit is prepared, a general all out invitation to cousins and great uncles goes out and they all arrive, spoons in hand. I keep the vacuum nearby when canning. This is illogical in the carbon foot print sense, but in a “kill that bug in my kitchen” sense, a vacuum can't be over rated.

Boil up your syrup and hope that the electricity doesn't go out. Hurricane Bill is in full throttle and the winds and rains are lashing. We are doing a team work effort to get the fruit cooked and processed through the water bath.

Water Bath: not an optional event. Also not a romantic moment. Do not climb in with your partner, it will hurt. A Water bath involves a huge pot of boiling water, a wire trivet on the bottom of the pot so the jars won't crack against each other and enough water to cover the jars. It takes an age to get the water up to a boil so this can be done while the syrup is being processed and the jars and lids are being sterilized. Because we have committed to making more preserves from local produce, we purchased a medium canning pot from Canadian Tire. Lots of dry goods type of stores carry them and they do simplify things. If this is your first go at it, use the pot you have for boiling corn or pasta and make sure your jars are covered at least a half inch with the water during the entire process. If the edge of the pot is too low, you may lose a lot of water in the roiling boil and have to top up. This might add to your cooking time. One solution is to use smaller jars and do the water bath twice. You do the math. Best bet is to borrow one for a day.

The recipes make it sound as if all the fruit cleaning, syrup boiling, sterilizing and water bathing will take about an hour. Nope, it takes a lot more. If you add up all the minutes, minus the Hurricane preparation and add in the help from darling hubby, it will take closer to two hours. Maybe three if the peaches are stubborn. (see above) This is not a bad amount of time. It is the time it would take to listen to a good CD or two and in fact, this is a good thing to be doing while undertaking the preservation of local foods. I also download an audio book from the library and listen to it during the water bath time.

This recipe yields 5 x 500 ml jars of fruit cocktail and that means about 10 deserts or 20 servings. Let's say the fruit, ingredients, jars, lids, electricity and time added up to about $30.00, divide it by 5 = $6.00 a jar. Seems pricey. Subtract the carbon foot print of buying tinned fruit or worse, the foot print of imported fresh fruit and I expect, it comes out looking much better. I haven't figured out how to do this kind of calculation but someone has and I've concluded that my time investment is worth the end product.

The addition of blueberries to the fruit cocktail turned the concoction a tremendous purple! Not mauve or light blue, but PURPLE. Just think how cool this will be when we open a jar in the dead of winter, pour it over ice cream or pound cake and have a chow down on fruit from our own province we will know that the carbon foot print was relatively small and plus, when I get to lick the bowl, I will have a huge purple tongue.