What Are You Preserving, and How Are You Doing It? (2016–)

[lemniscate]

 

@Steve IrbyAre you doing fresh dills with the pickles?    It's rare I can find small pickles here and they're usually over the hill, but I love a half-sour out of the jar/crock.   Can't even seem to find the commercial half-sours here anymore, tastes are changing it seems.

Edited July 2 by lemniscate (log)

[Steve Irby]

On 7/2/2025 at 8:49 AM, lemniscate said:

 

@Steve IrbyAre you doing fresh dills with the pickles?    It's rare I can find small pickles here and they're usually over the hill, but I love a half-sour out of the jar/crock.   Can't even seem to find the commercial half-sours here anymore, tastes are changing it seems.

I certainly agree with the changing taste observation.  I'm making an old school sweet pickles from a recipe that my Mom used so it goes back 90+ years. It's been the benchmark for  generations and is immediately identifiable in potato salad or coleslaw.  The cucumbers have to be really fresh and smallish so this batch turned out  really well.   

[Shelby]

Had a craving for @HungryChris' marinated mushrooms so got a jar of those going a couple days ago

 

 

Annnnnnd it's that time of year again!  Crock of pickles started day before yesterday.

 

[RWood]

This is the first batch of Hatch Chiles I have gotten in the freezer. My mom was at Kroger and grabbed them for me. But, she got the hot ones. So, I got two more bags of the mild, and figure I’ll mix so as not to hurt anybody just in case. They were $1.49/lb, which I thought was a good price. 

[Shelby]

22 minutes ago, RWood said:

This is the first batch of Hatch Chiles I have gotten in the freezer. My mom was at Kroger and grabbed them for me. But, she got the hot ones. So, I got two more bags of the mild, and figure I’ll mix so as not to hurt anybody just in case. They were $1.49/lb, which I thought was a good price. 

I've been doing the same thing.  Misfits has had Hatch chiles for several weeks now.  I can't seem to stop buying and freezing them lol.

 

 

[YvetteMT]

Tell me it's canning season without telling me it's canning season-

 

35 pounds of jalapeños tomorrow will become cowboy candy. 

[DesertTinker]

1 hour ago, YvetteMT said:

Tell me it's canning season without telling me it's canning season-

 

35 pounds of jalapeños tomorrow will become cowboy candy. 

Obviously you’ve done this before, a first timer wouldn’t know to do this much prep the day before. Will this be a one woman production, or do you have help?

Edited August 22 by DesertTinker
Clarity (log)

[YvetteMT]

58 minutes ago, DesertTinker said:

Obviously you’ve done this before, a first timer wouldn’t know to do this much prep the day before. Will this be a one woman production, or do you have help?

It's a one woman show.   I've not done this many at once (this is at least double my usual) and my concession to the amount will be using the food processor to slice the peppers!

[ElsieD]

I don't do a lot of preserving but we actually got good peaches in my neck of the woods.  So 10 quarts skinned, peeled, pitted and in the freezer.  13 quarts of strawberries were hulled and roasted for roasted ice cream.  The strawberries were only done up because they were excellent this year.  Those two items were bagged in the appropriate portions and frozen.  We also have delicata and sweet dumpling squash to deal with when they mature.   In addition, we share a small garden with my SIL who lives in the boonies so I gathered up some plum tomatoes, skinned, cored, ran them through a blender and cooked down to a sauce.  The sauce was then run through a food mill and run through the blender to smooth it out.  There are what seems like a ton of tomatoes yet to come.

Edited August 23 by ElsieD
Fixed a typo (log)

[ElsieD]

On 7/27/2024 at 9:29 AM, Shelby said:

Lots of sweet corn vac packed and in the freezer

 

 

 

Around 16 bags of spaghetti sauce

 

 

21 jars of plain tomatoes and juice are downstairs on the canning shelves along with homemade canned Rotel using our first jalapeños ready from the garden

 

Can you elaborate on the canned Rotel tomatoes?  I'll soon be getting a plethora of plum tomatoes.

[Shelby]

On 8/28/2025 at 10:24 AM, ElsieD said:

Can you elaborate on the canned Rotel tomatoes?  I'll soon be getting a plethora of plum tomatoes.

Yes   Peel tomatoes and put into your pot.  Add chopped jalapeños right away and let it all cook for a while.  Season with salt.  Can as you normally would.  If you have leftover tomato juice it makes wonderful bloody Marys.  

 

Rotel uses green chilies....if I ever had any on hand at the same time as I'm making this I'd add some of those, too.

 

[ElsieD]

Did up a pile of corn for the freezer today following @Shelby's directions.

[Shelby]

11 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

Did up a pile of corn for the freezer today following @Shelby's directions.

Ohhhh I'm kind of kicking myself for not planting any this year.  That looks so golden and sweet and delicious.  

[Smithy]

The peaches and nectarines in local stores (northeastern Minnesota) have come into their own, and I've been pigging out on them. A recent freezer-defrosting adventure turned up a couple of bags of peach pie filling made in advance, with the idea that I simply had to make the pie shell, plop the filling in, and bake. I was quite pleased with the result, discussed here in the Dinner topic. So I bought a bunch of peaches and nectarines, then spent yesterday peeling them, cutting them into chunks, adding ingredients and distributing them into freezer bags.  Here's the result:

 

 

Batches for 2 full-sized pies, 1 half-sized pie, and 4 hand pies. (Sorry the photo is a bit fuzzy.)

 

The good news: this time, I listed the proportions and quantities on the bags. My previous efforts hadn't listed quantities, so I had to guess by taste.

 

The bad news: in rereading the above-linked Dinner post, I see that I'd listed flour in the previous fillings. I forgot all about that. These have peaches, sugar to taste, and lemon. Hmmph. I'll have to make notations to add flour, because I probably won't remember when I get ready to make the pies!

[ElsieD]

@Smithy  What was the texture of the peaches like after baking? I have a LOT of peaches in the freezer right now as we were able to get our hands on some beauties.  I now worry that the peaches will turn to mush after baking them.

[Smithy]

30 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

@Smithy  What was the texture of the peaches like after baking? I have a LOT of peaches in the freezer right now as we were able to get our hands on some beauties.  I now worry that the peaches will turn to mush after baking them.

 

They're soft but retain some structure and firmness, much as canned peaches would. I have one last slice of that pie in the refrigerator, so I just pulled back a bit of crust to show you.

 

 

 

I think the texture after freezing, then baking, is about the same as if I'd baked the pie with fresh peaches -- but to be honest I could be misremembering. 

[ElsieD]

15 minutes ago, Smithy said:

 

They're soft but retain some structure and firmness, much as canned peaches would. I have one last slice of that pie in the refrigerator, so I just pulled back a bit of crust to show you.

 

 

 

I think the texture after freezing, then baking, is about the same as if I'd baked the pie with fresh peaches -- but to be honest I could be misremembering. 

Thank you.  This may be a dumb question but did you bake it using frozen, semi-frozen or thawed peaches?

[Smithy]

11 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

Thank you.  This may be a dumb question but did you bake it using frozen, semi-frozen or thawed peaches?

Not a dumb question at all! These were baked from semi-thawed. They'd been in the deep freeze since, oh, 2021 or 2022 (! yes, really!) and I'd set the package out to thaw one afternoon, then stuck it in the refrigerator when I realized I wasn't going to bake that day. There were still some ice crystals in the package when I loaded it into the pie shell. 

 

The original idea of the experiment had been to see if I could load a pie filling into a pie shell form, freeze it that way, then load it into a pie shell later and cook from frozen. Then, for whatever reason, I ended up freezing a flat and not-round package. The filling was loose enough for me to form it into the pie shape I needed, but it definitely wasn't completely thawed. It was really rather convenient.