freezing

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

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As I mentioned yesterday, our garden is quiet the producing machine right now.  The girls and I were in the garden all day yesterday and came out with bucket upon bucket filled with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, greens, and carrots.

This time of garden abundance reminded me of my favorite summertime dish to make:  gazpacho.  (Gazpacho is a tomato-based soup traditionally served cold.)  You can literally throw in anything and everything you have fresh in your garden, give it a whirl in your food processor and you have a healthy, flavorful dish.  It’s a great way to ensure you are getting all of your veggies in, and it tastes wonderful too.  In our house we like to serve the gazpacho in glasses and drink it like a smoothie, but you could serve it in bowls and eat it with a spoon if you prefer it that way.

In the particular batch I made yesterday, I used:  tomatoes, green and purple sweet peppers, banana peppers, garlic, red onion and cilantro.  I then add salt, pepper and Sriracha (our kitchen could not survive without this stuff) to taste.

Tomato Time

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Sorry for stepping away for a day, but my garden work kept me detained a bit longer than I thought when I was writing on Monday morning.  The tomatoes are in full swing  and I seemed to have gotten lost amongst the vines for a very long time before resurfacing and realizing that most of my day had passed me by.

This is the first year that we have not planted any slicing tomatoes.  We planted only small cherry-type tomatoes (Juliets and Mexican Midgets) for the girls to snack on, and paste tomatoes (Viva Italias, Speckled Romans and Amish Pastes) to use for tomato sauces and salsas.  What I didn’t realize about these types of plants is how many more fruits they produce compared to slicing tomatoes.  Oh my.  On Monday afternoon while I was picking, I found 4-6 ripe tomatoes, 6-8 I’m-almost-ready tomatoes, and about 20 addition green tomatoes just waiting to get ripe.  That is also not factoring in that each plant still has about 20-30 blossoms.  Apparently the tomatoes have done just fine with all of this heat.

So what to do with all of these lovely tomatoes?  Tomato sauce it is!  I love, love, love making tomato sauce.  I have no idea why I cherish this activity so very much, maybe its my Italian roots, but I look forward to this activity come late July each and every year.

Yesterday I woke up early to begin this favorite task of mine.  I went out to the herb garden, enjoyed the cool damp air from the rain the night before, and spent some time in meditation just picking oregano and basil.  It was a great start to my morning.  Then with coffee at the ready, and ingredients laid out, I went to work.  And what lovely work it was, in the quite of the morning before anyone else awoke to begin their day.  Ah.

My Tomato Sauce

I kind of fly by the seat of my pants with this recipe as (much like with my pesto). I first put a good amount of olive oil in the bottom of a stock pot.  I then add garlic and onion (chopped) and I cook that down until the onions become translucent, but not brown.

I then add my chopped tomatoes and my fresh oregano and basil.  I add a bit of salt and pepper at this point, cover the pot and let it cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes.  I then remove the lid and allow to cook for another hour or so.

At this point, I run a hand blender through the sauce (I don’t strain my seeds.  I know all the Nanas out there may turn their nose at this 🙂 )  Add more salt and pepper to taste.  Then I bring the sauce down to a simmer and leave it for several hours.  I stir it every once in a while to keep the bottom from sticking.  At the very end I add a bit of butter to cut the acidy taste.

I freeze my sauce as opposed to canning it because I find it hard to stick to an exact recipe, which is so very important to do if you are canning.  I normally freeze my sauce in wide-mouth glass quart jars filled about 2 inches from the top of the jar (to allow for expansion during freezing.)

Putting Food By: Pesto

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“Would you say your pesto is the besto?” ~Friends

Each and every time I watched Friends in college, snuggled up on the couch with my roomies, and heard Phoebe say this line, I roared with laughter.  Well, let’s face it, I pretty much laughed like crazy any time I watched that show.  But looking back, the funniest part is when I was in college, I had no idea what pesto even was!

Now that I have discovered the wonderful world of pesto, I definitely would not say my pesto is the besto, but by golly it is pretty darn tasty.  I love, love, love making pesto in giant batches and freezing it for use in the winter months.  It helps to bring that lovely basil taste that reminds me so much of summer to the table when the heat is on and the snow is falling outside.

The particular batch I made this weekend had toasted walnuts, basil, swiss chard, garlic, Parmesan cheese, olive oil and salt.  But the great thing about pesto is you can use a wide variety of nuts and/or greens and the pesto will turn out great.

When I freeze my pesto, I put it in 8oz, freezer safe, glass jelly jars.  I fill each jar to 1 inch from the top (to allow for expansion in the freezer).  It freezes beautifully this way, defrosts easily and allows for easy preparation when you pop it out of the freezer at a later date.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

Putting Food By: Dilly Beans

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We have a few little friends who have again found an entry point into our garden:  the rabbits.  So before they could reek havoc over too much of the garden space, I picked what I could from our bean patch because that seems to be their vegetable of choice right now.  I was shocked to find, that despite this incessant heat we have been experiencing, I was able to harvest quite a hefty bean crop.  In fact, I was able to gather so much that I needed to find something to do with some of them.  Enter dilly beans.

For those of you that have never had dilly beans, they are just plain yummy.  A little hot from the chilli peppers, a little sour from the vinegar and a little spicy from the garlic…what more could a girl ask for?

This year I found a great recipe in Putting Food By (listed below with a link), which only required a hot water bath canning method.  There were very few ingredients required and the entire process did not take long at all.  Now we have some more great summer veg ready to go for the winter.

What do you do with your surplus of green beans?  Leave a comment and share ideas with others.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

Putting Food By: Pickled Beets

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Despite the extreme heat we have had the past several days, our beets seem to be absolutely thriving.  In fact, they seem to be the only thing in our garden these days that are not being absolutely devoured by Japanese beetles.  Ug.

But enough of the negative and on to the positive…these beets.  Yum.  We pulled up our first round of beets this week and we were thrilled to find they had filled out nicely beneath the thick layer of soil.  My favorite way to eat beets is to pickle them, so I used a very easy pickling recipe from Putting Food By (listed below with a link), and before I knew it we had jars full of tart and scrumptious pickled beets.

 

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

Putting Food By: Rhubarb and Strawberries

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Today I bring you another quick food preservation tip.  Today’s topic:  rhubarb and strawberries…The perfect combo!  Rhubarb and strawberries freeze beautifully and it takes little time.

For the rhubarb:  Rinse the rhubarb and allow to dry.  Then cut off the rough ends of each piece.  Cut the rhubarb into 1 inch bits, toss into a gallon size freezer bag and you are done.  Throughout the year, I simply pull out the desired amount of rhubarb I need for a recipe, allow it to thaw out and you are all set.

For the strawberries:  Wash the strawberries and pinch off the green leaves and stem. Allow the strawberries to dry.  Then place the strawberries on a cookie sheet or baking pan.  Place the pan in the freezer for a couple of hours.  (This will allow each strawberries to freeze individually, so that you don’t have a giant mass of frozen strawberries in a freezer bag that you can’t use.)

Once the strawberries have frozen, toss them into a gallon size freezer bag and that’s it!  I pull these frozen jewels out all year long to add to our smoothies.  You could of course allow them to thaw and use them in baked goods as well.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

Putting Food By: Garlic Scapes

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This month marks the two year point from when I was able to start staying home with my little ones and really begin to start honing my homemaking skills.  The past two years have been magical, challenging, and as all new adventures are….educational.

One of my greatest feats I have been able to tackle has been putting food by for my family for those cooler months when food is not as abundant, or doesn’t come up at all.  Now, I word this as a feat because I was always so intimidated by the entire idea of food preservation.  I felt like there was so much research to be done, classes to be taken, and all of this was daunting because that meant time, time, time.

However, now that I have done the research, I have come to realize that putting food by does not have to be alarming at all.  And in all honesty, it doesn’t have to take up much time either.

My biggest source of information when it comes to food preservation has been talking with farmers and other shoppers at the local farmer’s markets.  You can learn a lot talking to the nona who has been canning tomato sauce for 50 years, or the farmer who has been freezing their strawberries for as long as they have been growing them.  And the great part about these conversations is that they don’t take any more than a few minutes, and then you can be on your way, ready to begin your preservation journey.

Yesterday I had one of these fabulous conversations with a local farmer who was selling garlic scapes.  Garlic scapes are the green off shoots that emerge from the soil when growing hardneck Rocombole garlic.  It looks much like a green onion, but a bit thinner and curly.  The farmer told me that you can prepare garlic scapes as you would green onions, but it obviously adds a lovely garlic taste to the dish instead of an oniony one.

The farmer then proceeded to tell me they freeze beautifully.  This made my ears perk up because I’m always in the market for food I can put by for another day.  She told me to simply rise off the scopes and cut them into one to two inch sections.

Then you simply place the pieces in a small zip lock freezer bag and freeze.  She told me she will pull a few chunks out if she is making chilli or soup in the winter time and she just throws them in the pot frozen and they cook up nicely and give the dish delicious spicy flavor.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader