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

[ElsieD]

2 hours ago, YvetteMT said:

I make partner soup nearly weekly for his lunches and use a quart of white beans to do so.   Making soup this week it registered that I was down to 1 quart left.  So today (and probably tomorrow), I'm canning navy beans. 25 lbs worth. 

Do you pressure cook the beans?

[YvetteMT]

27 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

Do you pressure cook the beans?

Pressure can. 

When using, add them to the soup with no need to cook a long period. (Basically the same as opening a can of beans from the store.)

[Smithy]

I got my last major haul of tomatoes and eggplants last weekend from my neighboring farmer. Today I faced facts: I wasn't going to get through all those tomatoes or eggplants before they went off. Time to get going on preservation.

 

It just about killed me, though: those beautiful slicer tomatoes! I had too many, and I have some green ones as well waiting for me to fry them, so I had to slice them, roast them, and save them for later.

 

 

(I kept out two fine-looking slicers, seen in the photo above, for the last-gasp-of-summer sandwiches: BLPT, or simply tomato and cheese. Believe me, I've been eating a lot of those!)

 

The sliced tomatoes got the same treatment I wrote about here: scattered salt, a bit of white pepper, finely sliced shallot, and EVOO, then roasted at around 425 - 450F until a lot of the juices had been cooked out. It will all go into a container and placed in the freezer. It's cooling now. I may not have cooked the slices as much as in past attempts, but I want to see what happens if the slices aren't dried quite so thoroughly.

 

 

I also bought 3 generous pints of cherry tomatoes from her, and today realized that I can't use them all before they go off. I saved some -- they're wonderful for snacks -- and roasted the rest more or less per @ElainaA's recipe for Slow-Roasted Cherry Tomato Sauce.

 

 

 

Finally, most of the Asian eggplants I bought from the same farmer became Preserved Eggplant per a recipe from Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables (eG-friendly Amazon.com link).

 

 

For more discussion about this recipe, see here.