ranunculus | Entries tagged with canning

This is so I have a good record.
Dill
4 cups Water
3 cups Distilled White Vinegar
1/3 cup Salt. Make sure it does not contain iodine or anti-caking ingredients. Plain sea salt or pickling salt is good.
1+ Tbs Sugar.
Pinch Cardamon Seed
Sm Pinch Coriander Seed
1+ tsp Mustard Seed
Heat above ingredients to a simmer and simmer for 5 to 10 min.

To each pint jar that is stuffed with cucumber add:
1/2 teaspoon Mustard Seed
1+ tsp Dill Seed. Or 1 head of dill.
1 clove garlic
5 to 10 Peppercorns
1 grape leaf

Ok, that's it, no more American made canning jars.
Backstory:
I have been, and still am, a person who buys what our nation produces whenever possible. However.
This year I joined a grocery platform called Azure. https://www.azurestandard.com/ ; Azure was started by a family in Oregon who, back in 1984, couldn't sell their grain harvest so they loaded a truck with it and drove to every organic store and outlet they could think of to sell it. Today Azure Standard sells direct to customers. Once a month or so customers are notified that orders will close shortly and then notified when a truck will be at their distribution point. Trucks go all over the USA carrying nice organic foods. I noticed that they had canning jars, and the description sounded great -- but they aren't made in USA, and worse, they are made in China. I sent a note that I would really love to buy some jars but didn't want to buy from China. A few days later I got a nice reply which said that they had standards for jars, how much of a thermal shock they would take, how durable they were and so on. They had tried every American glass making company they could find and none of them were willing to meet those standards. I sighed and got some nice American made jars. Just now the second of those brand new jars broke when I put it in the canning kettle. In all the canning I've done in the far past, I can only remember one jar breaking. Between last year and this year 3 have broken. Jars that were warm not cold when they went in the kettle, jars that had been handled carefully. Jars that wasted food and wasted my time an energy not just canning it but growing it. I'm done. Next year I will be purchasing new jars from Azure...

Here is my current Bread and Butter pickle recipe. Keeping it here means I can find it...
Fill the 4 quart bowl completely full of sliced cucumbers and onions. I like about 4 or 5 to 1 ratio of cucumber to onion. The onion amount will seem to double when you process the jars. Lots of directions say to slice the cucumbers very thin, I like them a bit thicker.

4 Quarts sliced Cucumbers and Onions.
1/3 cup of Salt. Pickling or Sea Salt.
Toss cucumber/onions with salt, cover with ice and let sit 2 to 4 hours.

In a largish pot combine:
3 cups White Vinegar
2 cups Sugar
2 TBS Mustard Seed
2 TBS + fresh Ginger Juice.
1 tsp Peppercorns
1 - 2 tsp Cumin Seed
2 tsp Turmeric Powder
2 tsp Celery Seed

Bring pot with spices to a boil just before cucumber mix is finished sitting. Drain cucumbers and discard any remaining ice. Do not rinse. Pour cucumber mix into spice mix and bring back to a simmer.
Prep 5 to 6 pint jars by washing, rinsing and heating. Fill with hot mix using funnel. Wipe jar rims, apply lids.
Process 10 minutes in waterbath.
When cool wash jars and label. Yeild about 5 pints.

Here is what I have learned this year about making my own dill pickles:
I started by making a 50% water 50% vinegar ratio. Needs less acid. I also started with just dill and pepper as spices. Needs more spice...
Here is the current recipe:
4 cups Water.
3 cups Distilled White Vinegar.
1/3 cup Salt. Make sure it does not contain iodine or anti-caking ingredients. Plain sea salt or pickling salt is good.
2 teaspoons Sugar.
Heat above ingredients to a boil, make sure salt and sugar are completely dissolved.

To each pint jar that is stuffed with cucumber add:
1/2 teaspoon Mustard Seed
1 teaspoon Dill Seed, heaping is good.
5 to 10 Peppercorns
1 pinch Coriander seed. (Exact amount not known yet).

I also want to see if adding young grape leaves will help keep them crisp.

Yesterday was a long day of canning. From right to left: dill cucumbers, bread and butter pickles (one okra on top), tomatoes with dill okra and lemon cucumbers on top; dill lemon cucumbers and dill Chinese long beans. Yes the four of us who eat these love dill!

Yesterday the second doctor looked at my hand. He thought I might have sprained or slightly torn the muscles between my ring finger and the two fingers on each side of it. This would have been back in mid-June. That injury is still swelling when I do too much with the hand. Grrrr. I now have a prescription for Nabumetone, having absolutely refused to take Diclofenac which is an awful, poisonous drug. My disability has been extended another month, hopefully I can get back to work before then.

Bought 40# of tomatoes at Wednesday's farmer's market. Canned up 19 quarts last night, all by myself since M is in Alaska (again). One more session like that and I'll be set for the year! At this point I have 31 quarts of tomatoes. Of course my hand didn't much care for canning and is very stiff and prickly this morning despite the meds.

Edit:
Put out another huge bag of shredded paper with the recycling last night (they did take it with the recycling and not the compost). Now working on the next big "yard waste" bag. It is really great to get more and more old stuff out of the basement.

Very hot the last two days, today got up to 94F. Supposed to be at least 15 degrees cooler tomorrow.

Some years ago I learned that spices should be fresh. Who knew? Certainly the bottled products on most grocery stores are faint, stale echoes of what the spice really should be. I now make an effort to replace any spice on my shelf that isn't used within a year. My local Co-op grocery store keeps spices in bulk (not usually a good thing) AND has a huge turnover in product so they are fresh.

At Maker Fair there was a new booth in my barn; Burlap and Barrel, a spice company. I stopped by the booth to say hello and had a chance to smell some of their spices. OMG! They were AMAZING. So of course I had to bring some home. Using them confirmed in my mind that they are, indeed, wonderful.
I encouraged the guys to come and speak on my stage, which they did, unfortunately to a very small crowd, which grew as the speaker went on. He had an encyclopeadic knowledge of spices. He asked the group what spice they liked and then went on to tell where that particular spice came from, the difference growing conditions made and any fun, or really special attributes of that spice. He was a very good speaker.

The company Burlap and Barrel started with our speaker, a chef, living in Afghanistan, India and traveling extensively in other parts of the world. He made contacts with small producers of spices, organic farmers that go the extra mile to produce quality. Having myself lived, for a while, in an extremely poor country, I feel strongly that supporting small farmers like this is invaluable.

Bottom line: Go to www.burlapandbarrel.com Try their spices.

Tomato canning. Easy, messy, yummy.
Canning is easy. It does have multiple little steps, but none of them are particularly hard. To get started it might be useful to know ( Read more... )

M and I canned tomatoes today. A dozen quarts and 14 pints. It is the very, very beginning of the beefsteak season. I ordered three boxes of tomatoes and got about half of that. Some of the tomatoes were pretty green. In another week or two I'll get two boxes more.

Last night M and I canned (or bottled if you are English) up two more boxes of tomatoes, 11 quarts and 15 pint-and-a-half jars. The grand total for the year is as follows:
62 quarts
15 pint-and-a-half
30 pints
2 half pints
I think this will hold me through the year.

Now I'm kind of thinking of canning a few jars of "vegetable medley".... No really just a few...

At the Wednesday Farmer's Market (3.5 blocks from home) last week I got 2 boxes of tomatoes. It really is nice, I know the guy in the corner booth, he grows fabulous tomatoes, something I can't do here in foggy SF, and he knows that if I ask for "three boxes next week" I'll come get 3 boxes next week. Last week we couldn't actually do the canning till Friday when we canned 22 quarts. It was a good start.

This week I got four more boxes, some Early Girl and some Beefsteak tomatoes. The Early Girl tomatoes are smallish, which is a pain when I'm blanching and peeling them, but they smell fabulous and are pretty evenly ripe. The Beefsteak tomatoes are meatier, and much larger (and thus far easier and faster to process), but tend to be much less evenly ripe and they don't smell anywhere near as good. In fact they don't much smell like tomatoes. Fortunately they -taste- like tomatoes!

The boxes of tomatoes arrived at my house about 5pm on Wednesday. One box got canned up last night. This morning I got up and went back to work, finishing around 4:30 pm.

Final count of all tomatoes canned this year:
51 quarts
30 pints
2 half pints

I had 2 pint jars left over. I swear there must be a box or two of quart jars hiding somewhere.....

Got two boxes of beautiful tomatoes, Early Girls I think, on Wednesday. Yesterday M and I canned 20 quarts of tomatoes. Took us about 6 hours including the time it took to finish the final water bath on the last 3 quarts.

Our new roomate is not going to last. Very much NOT the person I want to live with long term. I'll spare you the details.

Thursday was tomato canning day.
I spent a good deal of time on Wednesday getting ready, washing all the jars, they were clean, but a little dusty, and besides, my Mom taught me to wash all the jars before using them.

Wednesday evening I went to the Farmer's market in our neighborhood and bought 7 boxes of tomatoes. I figured I needed 5 of them and a friend of M's was supposed to be coming over to help can and learn the ropes. Each box contained 20+ pounds of tomatoes. Four of the boxes had beefsteak tomatoes, the rest heirlooms, which were huge.

Thursday I ran around and got a pressure canner, which is a big pressure cooker set up for canning. The instructions in its manual were about what you would expect from a manual designed by lawyers. Times were extended and the instructions suggested adding lemon juice to ripe tomatoes to increase the acid content. I dug out my old Ball Blue Book and compared. We reduced some times.

The result of hours of canning? At 8pm we had canned about 60 bottles of tomatoes, at least 30 of which were quarts. M's friend was pretty much useless, he arrived hours late, left early and only really worked when told: do this. Sigh. M and I worked like slaves, and Donald manned the downstairs stove. Thank goodness our downstairs tenant let us use the stove, we would have been dead in the water without it.

We had a box and a half of tomatoes left. I'm giving them away.

The beefsteaks canned beautifully, though they were a little harder to peel. The heirlooms had so much juice in them that they were not as good, canning up kind of watery.

Turned out that the pressure canner, while it does save a minute or two, doesn't save very much time over water bath canning, only worth it if you really need to kill a lot of bacteria.

Yesterday Donald downloaded Kubuntu for me. I backed up my computer and loaded it on my machine, a Sony Vaio. Now, I started out with Linux on Mandrake in a K desktop, and I -loved- it, for several years I loved it. Wasn't wild about the Gnome desktop that Ubuntu ships with but I've used it for the last year or two. So I was very excited to get the Kbutuntu product - except that it SUCKS. A big part of it is probably the stupid nVidia display driver card. nVidia hasn't ever played nicely with Linux, but at least in Unbuntu that problem is minimal. My word and spreadsheet programs crash, the cut and paste clipboard works partime, Firefox won't even load, and in general the distro is Buggy for this computer. Grrrr.
Tommorow I'm going back to Ubuntu.
Grump.

In other news: the working compost (not the one which was hot a couple of weeks ago) is now heating up - maybe. I innocently added some horse poop from the ranch to the pile. When I checked it on Sunday the temp was 120. Of course that was on a sunny afternoon when the outside temp was in the low 90's. Then I stirred everything up, incorporated a lot of brand new material, and tonight the temp is about 100. It's also a little dry. Fun with Compost! Tomorrow I'll wet it down a bit.

Garden:
Am setting more stones in the back, shadier part of the garden. Getting the load of compost this week gave me the material to build up those beds and establish them. Air quality is poor, and my ambition was low yesterday, but still got about six big rocks set. The hard/fun part of this is getting the line established for the bed, from my porch there is a sinuous curving line from the front of the garden to the shed door.
Picked lettuce and tomatoes after dark last night with the flashlight. This allowed me to catch and kill at least a dozen large slugs, and three or four snails that had targeted my lettuce as dinner. Caught one more big slug this morning as I was leaving for work. Hmmm, maybe there is something to the advice about hunting for snails and slugs after dark...

In our visit last Thursday my sister said she had gotten a 20# box of tomatoes to can. I perked up and asked if she could get 4 or 5 of them...
She has arranged ~4 boxes of tomatoes for us this Thursday. I'm very excited about canning my own tomatoes again as commercially canned tomatoes are one of the things we allergic folks are supposed to avoid. Since I'm allergic to milk and eggs, it's hard not to use tomatoes too! Homemade canned tomatoes have built in quality control... YAY! Not to mention how much healthier it is. It might cost $50 for the tomatoes, and I might have to buy a few jars, but compared to purchasing them at the store, I believe I will save money. Looks like the base cost of the tomatoes is between 2 and 3 times the cost, however that does not count the water that is packed in commercial tomatoes, which I'd bet equals out the cost. Taste and safety from mold is my primary motivation tho, and that should be excellent.