Pumpkins and Applesauce

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I've been pretending it's fall.  My imagination stretched itself like crazy to keep pretending this week while we had four days in a row of 100-degree weather, but nonetheless I pressed ahead pretending.  In a climate like this, combined with an unseasonably hot October, you just don't sit around waiting for baking weather or canning weather or everything nice weather, because it might not ever come.

What you should do instead is sign up for your grocery store's email list, browse their digital coupon collection, and maybe even download their app.  You'll find the best sales on apples ahead of time, which means you'll make and preserve your own applesauce for the first time in a couple of years. 

 It might be miserable, canning over a hot stove on a 99-degree day, but as it always happens with canning, you'll forget all the misery by the next morning and take a high level of joyous satisfaction in your beautiful jars all lined up in the pantry.

Then when you wake up one day and get the email that says you can have a free pumpkin, you can walk straight over to the store after breakfast with your husband to pick out your free pumpkin.  When you see that the bin is priced at flat-rate rather than per-pound pricing, you'll be glad you brought your husband to carry home the 20-pound pumpkin of choice.

You might discover that while 20-pound pumpkins fit in the sink to be washed, they do not fit in the oven to be baked.  No matter.  You'll manage to get it cut in half for partial roasting.

I'm hoping we've had our last 100-degree day of the year. But even if we have more hot days to survive, I'm grateful for the chance to tuck a few jars of applesauce into the pantry, and a few bags of pumpkin chunks into the freezer to use later in soups and stews.  

Home-made Applesauce

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There's nothing like a few jars steaming on the counter, their lids popping, sealing shut, to make me feel all cozy, homey, and well established.  

I love it when company comes over, and I can pull out a jar of home-made applesauce, and make them feel pampered.  

I love coming to those two perfectly round jars in my collection, the ones my mom gave me, which she had in her collection because they somehow came from her parents.  They are my two favorite jars, hands down.

I love putting in a few hours' hard yet simple work, with a good sermon on in the background, or a delightful husband to talk with while the chore gets done.

I love counting how many jars I've filled so far, and figuring out how many I get to enjoy every month for the next year.

I love washing everything up and getting beyond the mess when I know I'm done.

Maybe God smiled, then, knowing how much I love all these things, when He knew apples would be on sale at the grocery store the same week I would feel especially transplanted in this place where it's October and eighty degrees.  Maybe it was simply His plan to give me rooted feelings, reminding me He's a good Gardener still, ready, able, willing, delighted, not only to give me a home, but also to be my home.

{If you've never made applesauce or done any of your own canning before, applesauce is a great and easy place to start.  I'd recommend simply visiting the Ball Canning web site for recipes, recommended supplies, and more.}

What We Ate: September Edition

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We've got a lot going in the garden right now.  September is our rainiest month, and this September has seen even more rain than usual, with more than eleven inches. 


You can see some of our starts ride around on my sled on wheels for now, because that makes it easier to quickly get them out of the hard rain, which could flatten them in no time if given the chance.

See the basil hedge (next photo)?  It's well above knee high now, and we can harvest at least once per week.  In my September report on what we ate from the garden, you'll see basil is a frequent feature.  You can look at the actual list of what we ate each day at the end of this post, but for now I'll just tell you some of the ways we enjoyed the produce.

Basil

We have three main ways of eating basil:  as pesto (vegan and delicious!), as part of a chunky fresh pasta sauce or salad (tomatoes, roasted garlic and onion, olive oil, lemon juice, and avocado being several of the other main ingredients), and dried as a seasoning.  But this month?  We even got creative and experimented with an orange, pineapple, basil smoothie.  Which wasn't terrible, but not our favorite!  We've also had plenty of extra basil to make pesto ahead and tuck away in the freezer.

Parsley

We use parsley in everything from stir fry to tofu to its own "parsley cilantro salad", as we call it, but originally developed by a friend as a gluten-free tabouli salad.  I haven't managed to have enough left over from all these favorite meals to dry yet, but there are several plants growing nicely, so I'm sure I'll have enough to dry soon.

You can find my favorite ideas for using eggplant here.
 

Eating something from the garden every day was just one of our fall garden goals.  We've also been working on adding nutrients to the soil everywhere we can, as well as getting flower seeds and starts ready to put in for the bees.

Right now we're adding grass clippings to the soil as a mulch every time we mow the lawn.  When we spread the clippings around the eggplant bushes, we noticed an improvement in the plants within two days.  The grass clippings are a good quick source of nutrition for the soil, since they don't take very long to decompose.  That in addition to a few bags of manure here and there is making a big difference for our dense, clay-filled soil.

We had so much fun eating the produce from our garden every day, and we'll be keeping that up during October.  There's just no delight like the delight of picking leaves and fruits from your own plants, and bringing them in to make a meal, even if your garden produce is only a small percentage of the meal.

Want to see what we ate day by day?

1.  Guajillo pepper.  2.  Basil, parsley.  3.  Basil, parsley.  4.  Parsley.  5.  Basil.  6.  Basil.  7.  Basil.  8.  Basil.  9.  Basil, okra, eggplant.  10.  Basil.  11.  Basil.  12.  Guajillo peppers.  13.  Basil, guajillo peppers.  14.  Parsley.  15.  Basil, parsley.  16.  Parsley.  17.  Parsley.  18.  Basil, oregano, thyme.  19.  Basil.  20.  Cayenne, basil.  21.  Basil.  22.  Basil.  23.  Basil.  24.  Basil, parsley, okra, eggplant.  25.  Parsley.  26.  Parsley.  27.  Parsley, guajillo peppers.  28.  Guajillo peppers.  29.  Guajillo peppers.  30.  Basil, parsley, eggplant, okra.

Freezing Mangoes

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I grew up helping my parents can peaches, pairs, apricots, applesauce, and sometimes plums.  We froze strawberries and peaches and any other berries we could get our hands on in huge quantities, as well.  

Thus when I was in college I asked my mom to pass on to me something her dad had done for her:  canned fruit in pint jars to stock the dorm room with something awesomely delicious and homemade.  She was quick to oblige, and supplied not only me, but also a good friend and roommate with a goodly supply of peaches in pint jars.

My husband grew up freezing fruits and berries, too, but he had the bonus experience of helping his mom make all kinds of berry jams.

These are traditions we've continued into our adult lives, even staying up late into the night in graduate school to make sure we got all our grape juice canned before the grapes we picked would go to waste.

Food preservation looks a bit different in South Texas, though.  Because there's no winter to speak of, there's almost always something wonderful in season, and the idea of putting things away for the colder months just doesn't have the same urgency.

Nevertheless, try as you might, you just can't root out the food preservation habit once it's established.  Your brain replays these messages over and over.

Home-made is cheaper.
Home-made tastes better.
Home-made in the cupboard is faster than a last-minute trip to the store.

Last week, my husband found some for $2.50 a box, which we thought was a great deal.  We're hoping to get more this week.  Our latest project, therefore, is to find as many ways to preserve mangoes as possible.  Our ideas so far?

We'll freeze them--a couple of quarts are already in the freezer, just waiting to be made into smoothies and sorbets!
We'll dry them.
We'll make jam out of them.
We'll juice them, and research whether it's best to freeze or can the juice.
We might even make sauce out of them.  Mango sauce on pancakes, anyone?

How I Freeze Mangoes

While I would hesitate to say there's one correct way to freeze mangoes, this is the way I'm doing it.  At least this summer.

1. Cut up the mangoes.  I do this by making two slices, one on either side of the seed.  Then I do the messy job of getting as much fruit off the seed as possible, after which I move on to the easy part of slicing each mango "half" while it's still in the peel, and then scooping the slices out of the peel with a spoon.
2. Add a preserver.  Depending on how long you expect your mangoes to last in the freezer, it can be nice to add something to keep them fresh.  I add a little sugar (a Tablespoon or so for every two or three quarts) or Fruit Fresh (according to package instructions).  Lemon juice might also work, if you don't mind the tart flavor with the sweet of the mango.
3. Scoop into quart Ziploc bags or other container of choice, and put in the freezer.  These will of course freeze in the shape they're in when they first go into the freezer, so it's good to find a flat space for them until they're frozen solid.

Canning Orange Juice

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There's an orchard near our house that sells oranges and grapefruits for right around twenty cents per pound.  We've learned in the short time we've lived here that canning isn't something a lot of people do in a climate where there's something in season just about all the time.  

But it's in our blood, and we can't help but imagine how wonderful it would be to have our own orange and grapefruit juice all year long, so we buy a lot of oranges at a time and put our half gallon jars to good use.

I did a Google search to find out what I needed to know about canning orange juice.  Here is what I learned, from Google and from processing my own juice:

• Don't use a regular juicer.  The membranes between orange sections, and the white stuff between the peel and the fruity part will turn bitter after the juice is canned.
• Use a citrus juicer.  {See above.}
• One blogger recommended cooking the juice first, and then putting hot juice in hot jars for processing in a water bath.  I put cold juice into cold jars, which I then put into cold water.  I brought it to a low boil for twenty minutes (fifteen minutes would work for quart size and smaller), and took them out.  All my  jars have sealed so far.
• There's no need for sugar, but add some if your oranges are a little on the tart side, or if you like it extra sweet.  The juice we taste tested after canning was still perfectly sweet.
• Unlike the pulp in home canned grape and apple juice, the pulp in the orange juice remains sweet after it's canned.  In the above photo, the two jars on the left show what the juice looks like when it first comes out of the water bath (the pulp separates).  The jar to the right shows how it looks with the juice shaken so that the pulp is mixed with the rest of the juice again.
• I haven't tried making grapefruit juice yet, but by all accounts, the process will be the same.

Canning and Freezing Peaches

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 I grew up in a home where we canned and froze as many kinds of fruit as we had energy to work with in the summer and early fall.  Applesauce, canned pears, and of course frozen and canned peaches stacked up in my parents' extra freezer and in an insulated "fruit room" in a corner of our shop/garage.  I still believe there's nothing quite so beautiful as shelves full of fruits you've canned yourself, and no sound quite so exciting as the pop of a jar as it seals.

So it still surprises me a little, like it did yesterday, when I hear of people who haven't had these experiences like I have.  Or who didn't have a good friend to teach them when they wanted to learn.  If you happen to pop over here from Google wanting to learn how to can peaches, will you let me know if the instructions below were helpful?  Or if you have questions?  I can't stop by and spend the afternoon with you, chatting and slicing and snitching a peach here and there, but maybe this post can get you going.

Here's my first piece of advice:  get a friend or family member to help you with the work.  Canning and freezing takes less than half the time with two people than it does with one.  It just does.  If you don't believe me?  Try it both ways and compare.

For canning, you will need:

• wide mouth canning jars, with lids and bands
• water bath canner
• a jar lifter, such as this one 
• peaches
• sugar/sweetener
• clean water (use filtered water for every part of the process if you filter your drinking/cooking water)

For freezing, you will need:

• freezer zip lock bags, or freezer safe containers of your choice
• peaches
• sugar/sweetener

 The first few steps for freezing and canning peaches are the same, so begin here for either chore.

1. Buy free-stone peaches.  Peaches that are not free-stone don't come off their pits very easily, which makes them easy to squish and crush.  If the crushed peach look is what you're after, that might be fine, but it will take you longer to process the peaches.
2. Be sure the peaches are ripe.  The results of your canning and freezing will be drastically improved in flavor if you do.  Ripe peaches don't have any green showing in the stem area (or anywhere else), and are soft to the touch.  Peaches are typically not quite ripe when you buy them in the store or the stand, and will not necessarily all ripen at the same time.  Separate out the ripe peaches when you're ready to freeze or can.
3. Try to set yourself up ergonomically.  You'll need a work space you can be comfortable in for several hours, so try to make sure you can sit down if you need to and have everything within reach.
4. Blanch the peaches, a few at a time.  Blanching makes the peaches super easy to peel, which takes your time down by a lot (and saves you from cutting parts of the peach away when you peel each one--blanched skins come off with only the skin).  Bring a large pot of water to boil (enough water to cover the peaches).  When the water is boiling, put as many peaches in the water as will fit in the pot.  Let them stay in the water (even if it's not boiling once the cool peaches are put into it) for 30-60 seconds.  Remove them with a large spoon (preferably with holes in it), and let cool until they are touchable (it doesn't take long).
5. While waiting for the pot of water to boil, get out a large bowl and fill it about two-thirds full of water.  Add a little sugar, lemon juice, or Fruit Fresh (found on the canning aisle of just about every grocery store).  When you've peeled the peaches, place them in this bowl so they won't get brown while you prepare enough for your jars or freezer containers or bags.
6. Peel the peaches.  The skins will come off easily now.  I like to slice the peach in half and twist it off the pit before I slide the skin off the peach.  If you slide the skin off the peach before you twist one half away from the pit, it's MUCH harder to get the peach off the pit, even if it's a free-stone peach.
7. Put the peach halves into your bowl of water.  When that's full, you're ready to fill a few jars or freezer bags.

If you're here for canning, continue to the steps in this section.  If you're here for freezing, skip to the next section.

1. Prepare your jars--wide mouth jars are best for peaches, especially if you plan to can halves (you can do any size of chop you want, but bigger is faster as far as your time is concerned).  Wash them--the dishwasher is a great option here, if you've planned ahead.  Also wash the bands and lids.  The lids are not re-usable (I've heard of some re-usable types, but haven't tried any yet), but the bands can be used year after year.  Just don't use any with rust. 
2. Prepare your syrup.  Now, I have canned peaches without any kind of sweetener in the water, but I DON'T recommend it.  Here's why--and it's exactly what happened the year I experimented with the no-sweetener canning:  You start with naturally sweet fruit, and put it in jars with water, which has no sweet in it whatsoever.  The sugars in the fruit escape into the water, to make everything in the jar sort of equally sweet.  So your unsweetened water ends up sweet after the canning process, but your peaches end up less sweet than they were to begin with.  So use a sweetened syrup of some kind.  I have used two methods, and I'll share both with you.  They worked equally well.
3. Syrup #1:  Put 1/4 cup sugar of choice in each quart sized jar.  Put a little water in each jar, stir it up, and add the fruit up to the neck of the jar.  Then cover the fruit with more water until none of it sticks up above the water.  (Again, this should be about up to the neck of the jar.)
4. Syrup #2:  Put 1 cup of sugar in a 4 cup measuring cup, and then fill with water.  This will end up being more than 3 cups of water, of course, because the sugar dissolves into it.  When it's dissolved, pour the syrup over the peaches in the jar as described above.
5. Once the jars are filled,  wipe the rims of the jars with a clean, wet cloth or paper towel.  For the jars to seal, the point of connection between the rubber on the lid and the glass rim have to be completely clean.
6. Screw the lids on with the bands, and place in the water bath canner.  Fill the canner with water up to the necks of the jars.  Bring to a boil, and let boil for 20 minutes.  And know your stove--don't let the peaches boil so hard that the liquid in the jars boils over and out of the jar.  This can hinder the jar from sealing when you take it out of the canner.  You may need to turn the temperature down when the water boils.
7. Remove the jars from the canner.  I like to use a kitchen implement specifically for this purpose, which you can purchase on the canning aisle of most grocery stores, and even stores like Fred Meyer or Walmart.  I place the jars on a couple of layers of kitchen towels on the counter to cool.  When you hear the lids start to "pop"  and you can see that the lid is dented in instead of out, the jar is sealed.  You can also tell if a jar has not sealed when, after sufficient time to cool, the fruit is not floating in the syrup but resting on the bottom of the jar instead.
8. When the jars are cool, remove the bands from the jars and wash both the bands and jars.  They can get a little sticky in the water bath process.  (Once the jars are sealed, the bands make no difference to the seal--just the lids do.)  Store the jars with the bands or without.  
9. Your peaches will keep for several years...but I've never had them around long enough to find out just how many!  I like to aim for a total of jars that's a multiple of twelve, so I can average a certain number per month (ideally, a minimum of 48, so I can average four every month or nearly one per week of the year until the next canning season).
10. A note about water temperatures:  If you're planning to put your jars into water that is boiling or close to boiling, you need to bring the jars to a boil with the water, and you need to pour near-boiling syrup over your fruit (into the already-very-hot jar).  I personally don't like to do this, because I am clumsy enough to burn myself on the jars or with the water at every turn.  I make cold syrup, and begin the canning process in water that's cool enough to keep my finger in for a few seconds.  If you put cold jars with cold contents into boiling water, they will shatter during the canning process.  If, however, you begin with water that's comfortable to the touch (both inside and outside the jars), the jars will be tempered as the canning process happens.  Cold jars need to be heated gradually, right along with the water--otherwise, you will risk losing your jars and your peaches.

Continue here if you're freezing your peaches.

1. Chop your peaches to a size that will efficiently fill your freezer bags.  My mom and I like to chop them down to bite-sized chunks.
2. Mix them with a little Fruit Fresh or sugar (similar concept as described in step 2 of the canning section).  Even though these peaches will not be surrounded by water, like in canning, they do have the potential to get brown and to lose their sugars into the peach liquids that inevitably come out of the peaches as you process them.
3. Put them into the freezer bags or containers of choice.
4. Lay bags flat in your freezer--you don't need randomly shaped bags of peaches running around in your freezer.  If they're laid flat to begin with, they'll be much more stackable and rearrangeable when they're frozen in solid blocks.

Making Low-Sugar Plum Jam

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A girl I met picking plums last week said she likes to make plum syrup and plum jam.  

 

I'll spare you the story of how I ended up there picking plums to begin with, except to say that four adults were out under the trees picking plums for which we had no plan.  Does that seem crazy?  Not in our family.  When we know of food to be harvested, we go do it.  Then we wonder what we'll do with all the stuff we just brought home.

 

Thus we heard her ideas with some relief mixed with sparkling eyes as we thought, That's a really good idea.  Maybe we should have brought buckets instead of bowls like she did.

 

Thing is, sometimes we get home, even with a good idea in our heads, and run out of time to actually do that idea.  Especially when we get home only a few minutes before Sabbath sundown and there are twenty-four hours left before we will be doing any major kitchen work, and the day after that is the all-day air show and the day after that almost everybody goes back to work for the week.

 

Which leaves me. 

Me, with a pile of tiny but tasty plums, and only the internet available to teach me how to make plum jam.  Or syrup.  And I decide that since I made strawberry jam in the spring for the first time, plum jam can't be any harder than all that except for this being alone in the kitchen thing, and the these-things-all-have-pits thing.

Being cautious about acid levels in canning like I am, I read the pectin label and ended up confused:  should I use lemon juice, or not?  Perusing various plum jam recipes on the Ball Canning web site, I at length settled on this one, Jam Maker Plum Jam--Low Sugar.

I'm a little relieved to see today, after the fact, it really did tell me I could make this recipe and then use a water bath to can them.  (You can also use it fresh or freeze it--all of the preservation methods they recommend are found here.)  Because that's what I did the other day.  Anyway, I'll let you visit their links to get the recipe and more detailed instructions.

We all liked the result, with these observations:

• Making the jam without blanching or peeling the plums gave it a tangy, slightly sour taste.
• Making the jam with a generic recipe from the pectin bottle (which would have added some fruit juice concentrate to the mix instead of just sugar) might work well, since it would offset the slight sour a little more.
• Making plum jam out of small plums with only one person on duty takes forever.  Enlist help next time.  The jam process was not nearly so long as the pitting process.

Today's Playlist

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 I harvested mint from my parents' yard today, some to dry, and some leftover to figure out what to do with fresh.  Maybe some Indian chutney?  Maybe some minty summer (non-alcoholic) drink to offer my parents when they arrive home from their anniversary trip this evening?

When I first arrived here this summer, my dad showed me the beautiful patch of mint growing, and reminded me that I had given him a couple of shoots with their root ball when they moved here.  It was somehow delightful and comforting to have the "offspring" of my own plant from Washington state when I had just come from Virginia.  It made me feel more like I have roots right now, during this transition time of life.

While I plucked leaves for the dehydrator, it dawned on me that I again have access to the wonderful recordings on YouTube.  It has been quite some time since I had internet at home, thought I, so that I could do serious listening from the kitchen.

Then like lightning it struck me:  One year ago today, I took comprehensive exams for my master's degree.  What a day it was!  Six hours of essays and theory problems to solve.  I love solving theory problems, to tell you the truth, so it was not a loathsome six hours.  Just very intense.  All at once.  My hand felt weary from writing at the end of the day.  I visited the grocery store directly afterward, and added up my purchases in mod twelve.  Exactly like I would if I was analyzing a twelve-tone row, or a pitch class set.  

So today, I'm listening to favorite pieces from the repertoire.  Pieces I've studied in depth, pieces I grew to love the more as I studied them the more.  Some, I'm listening to more than once.  Since I have to get right back to my mint leaves, then my lunch, and then the strawberry patch, I won't write about each piece.  But you'll write and tell me if there's more you want to know about any of them, right?  I hope you love them as much as I do!

 

Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn

Vienna Philharmonic, 1973

 

 Mendelssohn "Reformation" Symphony

Conducted by Leonard Bernstein (hence his photo above)

Charles Ives Symphony No 2

This video also has the particular delight of an explanation of the symphony and introduction to Charles Ives himself by Leonard Bernstein, which is incredibly worth listening to.  Then once that's finished, listening to Symphony No. 3 ("The Camp Meeting"), my favorite, is also a wonderful use of your time.

 

A First: Making Strawberry Jam

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Making jam last week and this week was a delightful first for me.  I wanted to make it last summer, but comprehensive exams may or may not have stood in the way.  Oh, and moving.  That stood in the way too.

This year, I was determined to pick and freeze strawberries, as well as make jam.  While it's not the season yet for a lot of you, and the farms here are saying it will be another week or so for us, I did do some price checking.  At Costco, they are selling the berries for ten cents a pound less than the you-pick place I know of.  You can guess, right, that I did not wait to pick my own?

Because I'll do a lot to save a dime, but if I save a dime and actually work less to save it?  Sign me up.

And because there are changes coming in our household, and I don't know from day to day what I'll be doing or where I'll be, let alone where I'll be living by July.  (That surprise place may come before then, even).

Thus, NOW is a good time for strawberries.  They won't go in the freezer, since frozen goods don't travel well.  And rather than give up on preserving berries because life is full of change, I want to be resilient in the midst of the changes.  Which means preserving so that the berries will not be perishable.  Which means making jam.  And possibly fruit leather....but that doesn't last long when I'm around!

As a result, there are a dozen or so little jam jars sitting full around the house, ready to be packed for a move or eaten, whichever comes first.

{Being ignorant of jam making and somewhat in a hurry since the strawberries were already in my car, I just bought pectin and followed the recipe on the container.  It worked exactly like it said it would, and the jam is yummy.  In the future, though, I want to try low- or no-sugar options, or freszer jam.  Would love to see recipes and hear experiences from any of my readers who know more than I do!}