What Are You Preserving, and How Are You Doing It? (2006 - 2016)

[Darienne]

Our Macintosh tree went into overdrive this year and produced more apples than I believed one tree could ever produce.  Besides giving away many bushels of them I have made (and am still making as we speak) the following:  apple sauce, apple cider, apple cakes (a few different kinds), dried apple slices, apple leather with and without sliced nuts in it, apple butter, apple syrup, and quarts and quarts of Apple Pie Ice Cream.  I have still to try hard apple cider.  A friend suggested apple cider vinegar but I don't think I'm in the mood.

 

We've had a good frost and still the apples keep on falling from the tree.  45 just today.  When will this end?  I think there are still a couple of hundred left at the top of the tree. 

 

Our Northern Spy produced about 45 apples in total.  It's not a well tree.

 

Actually we have over 20 apple trees on the property, many escapees from one of the original houses, and some of the apples are ones you never see anymore in the stores.  And haven't for a very long time.  And they are not really tasty by 'modern' standards.

[Shelby]

Darienne, I'm super jealous.  I know you've done a TON of work, but you'll enjoy the heck out of all you've put up later.

 

I wish we were neighbors

[ElainaA]

Darienne, I'm super jealous.  I know you've done a TON of work, but you'll enjoy the heck out of all you've put up later.

 

I wish we were neighbors

Me too.

[blue_dolphin]

Lime ginger marmalade. I used the recipe for fine-shred lime marmalade in "Saving the Season" by Kevin West. I'd use more ginger next time, but overall, it's OK.

Took me a while to remove the peels and slice both fruit and peels finely:

They were to sit in water overnight, boil 20 min and sit O/N again. Here they are after those steps and ready to boil again, before adding the sugar:

I thought it looked awful but things got better:

Made 6 half pints and 12 small 4 oz jars.

There's a little bitterness but not too much. Very nice on toast with a little goat cheese:

Thanks to andiesenji for the tips!

[Martin Fisher]

Posted Today, 07:56 PM
Today i froze the tail end of the green bean harvest and processed the last batch of tomato conserva of the season.

FWIW, the process, quoted below from a post in another forum.....

"I switched to this method long ago because I got tired of processing tomatoes in a super-hot late summer kitchen.
Zero-heat tomato water and conserva.
Wash tomatoes thoroughly (preferably a well flavored roma-type, like Martino's Roma or Opalka, but any tomato will work.)
Place tomatoes on sheet pan and freeze solid.
Remove tomatoes from freezer and run under a slow steady stream of cold water, the skins will easily slip off.
Very coarsely chop the semi-frozen tomatoes (3/4" sized pieces) and place in a cheesecloth or muslim lined colander overnight or until they stop draining. The resulting tomato water will be quite clear.
Run the tomato remains through a food mill to remove the seeds. This is a snap because the freezing does a very good job of breaking down the tomato flesh. The resulting conserva should be thick enough so that a wooden spoon will stand up in it.
I then freeze the conserva or further process it.
This requires some planning ahead, but it produces some very nice tomato water and conserva without a lot of fuss or heat!!!"

[ElainaA]

 

I'm not sure if this is preserving (as I think of it) or a confection - but I took my tangerines out of the syrup today and spread them out to dry. They need to dry for a few days then will get packed away for holiday candy and baking. Tomorrow I will start lemons. I seem to be incapable of working on two types of fruit at the same time.

 

[suzilightning]

NOT my putting up but oh...my...goodness.  Just back from our place down the shore and stopped by my usual place to buy a jar of beach plum jelly for a Christmas present for Johnnybird and they also had zucchini relish.   Thank you to Rea's farm....I hope to be able to get more next year because this is something I am now addicted to and I may need to learn how to make.

[blue_dolphin]

Yesterday, I made some butternut squash pickles (posted over here in the winter squash cook-off thread) and also tried some pickled cranberries, both small pilot batches to see if they'd make good holiday gift add-ins.  I used this recipe for the cranberries but doubled the ginger and grated it instead of slicing so the ginger flavor is quite punchy at the moment.  I suppose that may mellow over a bit of curing time.  I only used 2 bags of cranberries instead of 3 so I ended up with a good amount of leftover brine or as I'm calling it, cranberry-ginger shrub.  

I already tried it in the cranberry shrub cocktail recipe that David Leibovitz posted the other day and it was quite tasty indeed.  And the cranberries themselves are very nice with some sharp cheddar and crusty bread.  

 

 

[cakewalk]

I love fresh cranberries. Yesterday I made cranberry chutney from a recipe I found on-line years ago. During the week I'll try the one above, it's spiced quite differently. Looks lovely. There's nothing quite like that color. 

[blue_dolphin]

Yes, that cranberry color is so festive, isn't it?  I was a little disappointed that some of the cranberries sort of exploded (as they do) in the brine rather than all remaining intact. For some reason, I thought maybe the acid from the vinegar might help keep them all whole but that was not entirely the case.  As a condiment, it's probably not a big deal, and there are certainly whole berries in there  but I think I'll try to be more gentle with the heat and stirring with the next batch.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

NOT my putting up but oh...my...goodness.  Just back from our place down the shore and stopped by my usual place to buy a jar of beach plum jelly for a Christmas present for Johnnybird and they also had zucchini relish.   Thank you to Rea's farm....I hope to be able to get more next year because this is something I am now addicted to and I may need to learn how to make.

 

Hi suzilightning,

 

I was intrigued by yet another tasty thing to do with zucchini. I had never heard of it. I searched and found plenty of recipes, most of which were sweet. I'm not a big sweet fan, but this recipe for a spicy relish sounded good to me.

 

I also searched for Rea's Farm zucchini relish but only came up with your post where you used it on bison burgers.

 

Would you be kind enough to describe this relish. It sounds promising. There may well be others interested, as many who read and post in this thread are inundated with summer zucchini from their gardens.

[kayb]

One more batch of preserving to be done. Arkansas Black apples are in season now, which means -- apple butter!

[cyalexa]

Green tomato quickles. 

 

[Shelby]

More info please   How long will you leave them before tasting?  A week?  SOOO yummy looking!

[cyalexa]

9 hours ago, Shelby said:

More info please   How long will you leave them before tasting?  A week?  SOOO yummy looking!

 

I actually made them quite some time ago, shortly after our first frost. This is my last jar so I finally took a picture. I started tasting them after about a week and they were pretty good but time has made them much better. I use the same solution for all quickles (except for pickled ginger): one part water, one part vinegar, one half part sugar plus 1 TB Morton kosher salt per cup of water in the recipe, optional add-ins like mustard seed are added at a rate of 2 tsp per cup of water. I boil the solution and pour it over the veg. 

[kayb]

Those look GOOD, @cyalexa! Need to try that next year. A friend gave me a recipe for canning green tomatoes which she said would result in slices suitable for frying, but I've never tried it. 

 

I wound up with a good-sized batch of apple butter -- nine pints and 12 half-pints, a good bit of which is being given for Christmas gifts. I think it's some of the best I've ever made.

 

 

I also tried something new the other day to use up some bananas that were about to go south on me -- banana jam. All the Interwebs recipes seemed to be horribly heavy on sugar, so I wound up with: four ripe bananas, mashed; 1/2 cup brown sugar; 1/2 cup water; 1/2 tsp cinnamon; 1/2 tsp nutmeg; 1/4 tsp cloves; 1 tbsp lemon juice. Boiled the water with the sugar and spices and lemon until sugar dissolved; added the bananas, cooked and reduced over emdium low heat for maybe 30 minutes. This is Good Stuff on a peanut butter sandwich!

 

I did not water-bath process it since there was so little of it, but for a larger batch, I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

 

One caveat: The color of the finished product is...not attractive. Those of you who have changed a dirty diaper will understand.

 

 

 

 

 

[Darienne]

I'm delighted to say that our apple production is long over and we are using up the results at an alarming rate.  The most popular item preserved, so to speak, turned out to be the Apple Cider Salted Caramels (much enhanced by DH's insistence of added toasted nuts and a dipping in chocolate).  Never got around to the Hard Cider.

 

The apple cider is used in every breakfast and to make caramels and the apple sauce is being made into apple leather (with nuts) as we eat the last batch.  I don't think...no, I know...I have never eaten so many apples in my life.   Oh and another hit for the apple sauce is the cake from Arey's Mother's friend.   Made several and into the freezer they went.  Delicious sliced with cold butter or cheddar cheese (5-year cheddar, but then we are Canadians! )

We've set up with a local tree person to have the two backyard trees properly pruned.  And two trees which gave only ho-hum apples in the past are now producing tasty apples so we'll watch those two for next fall.  They are out on the property far from the house so we are not having them attended to.   It's been a wonderful, if exhausting, experience.

[Fernwood]

53 minutes ago, kayb said:

I also tried something new the other day to use up some bananas that were about to go south on me -- banana jam. All the Interwebs recipes seemed to be horribly heavy on sugar, so I wound up with: four ripe bananas, mashed; 1/2 cup brown sugar; 1/2 cup water; 1/2 tsp cinnamon; 1/2 tsp nutmeg; 1/4 tsp cloves; 1 tbsp lemon juice. Boiled the water with the sugar and spices and lemon until sugar dissolved; added the bananas, cooked and reduced over emdium low heat for maybe 30 minutes. This is Good Stuff on a peanut butter sandwich!

 

I did not water-bath process it since there was so little of it, but for a larger batch, I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

 

One caveat: The color of the finished product is...not attractive. Those of you who have changed a dirty diaper will understand.

 

 

I'm sure this is great, if you like bananas (I confess that I don't).  

 

You are probably more knowledgeable than I, but I have to ask the canning safety question here.  Bananas are not as acidic as some fruits, I think; maybe more sugar makes a safer recipe for water bath canning?  

[Anna N]

Inspired by something I recently read although I cannot remember where, when it came time to clear out my fridge today I  recalled some wise advice.   The suggestion was that in order to reduce food waste use a mind filter to assess anything before you toss it in the bin

Roasted?

Soup?

Stock?

 Pickles? 

 

So some of my "long in the tooth" produce became soup and these jalapeños became pickles. I followed a recipe on David Lebovitz' blog.  Having taste tested a single tiny bite of jalapeño these are not suffering from the anemia that many people complain about. They are hot!   My son in law is in for a treat,

 

 

[HungryChris]

I too am a fan of the green tomato pickle. This picture is from pickling day in late October, but in the last month they greatly improved in flavor and have been outstanding. I did not have enough from my garden and had to buy these from a local farmer.

HC

 

 

Edited December 22, 2015 by HungryChris
Can't seem to remove duplicate image (log)

[kayb]

4 hours ago, Fernwood said:

 

I'm sure this is great, if you like bananas (I confess that I don't).  

 

You are probably more knowledgeable than I, but I have to ask the canning safety question here.  Bananas are not as acidic as some fruits, I think; maybe more sugar makes a safer recipe for water bath canning?  

I would think the addition of the lemon juice would make it acidic enough; I might add some citric acid for good measure if I water-bathed it. Honestly, it's so simple to make I don't see making a large enough batch to worry about it.

[ElainaA]

You know that bottle of wine that a friend brought to your party? The one that got opened and one, maybe two, glasses were poured? And it is not a wine you like? Wine jelly!

(I am pretty sure I posted a very similar picture last year, also after our New Year's Day brunch. And I am also sure it was the same friend that brought the same variety of wine. A very good friend. We just disagree on wine.)

 

 

[Shelby]

Wow, very pretty Elaina!  

 

I like that kind of wine  a lot.  Bet I would like the jelly too  

[ElainaA]

16 minutes ago, Shelby said:

Wow, very pretty Elaina!  

 

I like that kind of wine  a lot.  Bet I would like the jelly too  

I don't mean to disparage the wine - but white zinfandel just isn't to my taste. If my daughter had been home I probably wouldn't have had enough to make my jelly.

[Shelby]

Just now, ElainaA said:

I don't mean to disparage the wine - but white zinfandel just isn't to my taste. If my daughter had been home I probably wouldn't have had enough to make my jelly.

Oh you didn't disparage it!  You were very diplomatic