Catching Up on Summer

We have been gone for so much of the summer, and my garden has been a bit ignored. But now that I am home, I have been trying to catch up on the work that needs to be done and enjoying more of the harvest!

Today I finally was able to harvest a few heirloom tomatoes. So far, the rest of our harvest has succumbed to blossom end rot. The temperatures here this summer have been unusually high and a lot of my plants aren't happy. Daytime highs have cooled into the eighties though, so I am hoping I may still get a decent end-of-summer harvest. Those strange greenish looking ones are called green zebras and they are delicious!

We have a plum tree that often produces a crazy amount of sour plums. This year, I tried making dried plums in the dehydrator for the first time. I had avoided it in the past because I thought they would just be way too sour.. and they are sour, but they are delicious too. So glad I decided to give it a go! I just sliced the plums in half (skin and all), took out the pit, added a little cinnamon and put in the dehydrator on 130F for about 24 hours. I made two rounds in the dehydrator..... and we have a lot of dried plums.

I also made blackberry-plum fruit leather. I pureed equal-ish parts blackberries and de-skinned and de-pitted plums. Added some honey and cinnamon. Dried in the dehydrator for about a day. Yum.

and, as always,  plum chutney. This year I added red peppers, and I also sauteed the onions and the spices before adding the plums and simmering.

We also have a plethora of zucchini (doesn't everyone?). For whatever reason, it is the one type of squash that seems to be doing well in my garden this year. It must be more resistant to blossom end rot than the winter squashes. Anyways, I just made some curried zucchini soup this week. It is a long-time favorite of mine and the kids love it too (they don't know that there is zucchini in there so shhhh! don't tell them!). Even though it is served warm, I still love it on a summer evening. I think the tang from the yogurt gives it a refreshing quality.

Lastly, I have gathered a whole bunch of herbs from my garden: bee balm, echinacea, lemon balm, dandelion, plantain, mint, yarrow, lavender, and calendula. It is infusing in olive oil and soon I will make some lip balm and super salve!

 

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On Pickling

Last year I made pickles for the first time. And they were delicious. So, of course, I wanted to make more this year. Sadly, our pickling cucumber plant didn't produce much, so I had to head to the farmer's market to get enough cucumbers to pickle... but it was worth it. I made some refrigerator pickles, loosely following the same basic recipe I used last year. Easy and delicious.
When we returned from our travels, one of our pepper plants was full of peppers, all ready for the eating. So, I also made a jar of pickled Bulagrian sweet pickles using basically the same recipe: I chopped up the sweet peppers, as well as one serrano, added peppercorns, coriander seeds, garlic cloves, mustard seeds, and a couple of grape leaves for crispness. Boil some white vinegar, and cover the peppers until jar is about 2/3 full, add enough filtered water to cover the peppers. Seal lid, let cool, and refrigerate. Easy. The peppers are yummy,  although they are quite a bit hotter than I expected (I think I should have removed the serrano seeds first!).
The pickles and peppers were both good, however, I was feeling the need to be a bit more adventurous in my pickling and wanted to try more than just basic vinegar pickles and peppers. I recently read Michael Pollan's Cooked, which has an entire section on fermentation. We think of pickles as being a fermented food, because they once were. However, most pickles we eat today, like the refrigerator  pickles I made, are not truly fermented. The are pickled in vinegar, which is itself fermented, but from what I understand, the pickles themselves never actual ferment. And fermented foods are amazing for you... they are essentially packed with probiotics and do wonders for your digestion. But, I guess those pickles made with vinegar are cheating. So, I wanted to make REAL pickles. The kind that actually ferment. The kind that grow probiotics.
So, I did.
I looked up recipes for pickling using lacto-fermentation. There wasn't a ton of information out there and there was a while lot of variation in what I did find. Many called for whey, which I didn't have and didn't really want to bother with, so I loosely followed a recipe that just used salt instead of whey. Here is what I did:
Cut the cucumbers and pack in a jar. Add in peppercorns, fresh dill, a garlic clove, red pepper flakes, and mustard seeds. Stuff a few grape leaves and horseradish leaves in the jar, add salt, and fill the jar full of room temperature filtered (non-chlorinated) water. Screw the lid on and leave the jar on the counter for 3-4 days. Apparently, the bacteria naturally present in the foods start to get to work and ferment the food one it is all sealed up.
After a day or so, I saw the water in the jar start to change colors and become dingier. I also saw some bubbling, which was a good sign that things were actually fermenting. I checked the pickles after 3 days... and it smelled pickle-ish but also a bit like sulfur. Ewww. In Cooked, Pollan talked about how fermented foods sometimes go through a gross stage before you get to the good part of fermentation. So, I shut the lid, and decided to check again on day 4. Things smelled better so I decide to give it a try. And, they were...... pickles!! Yay!! Except WAY too salty. I had followed salt amounts from a website, but they were definitely incorrect. I think I added 1 Tbl to my quart jar and it made these pickles inedible. I think I would halve the salt next time around.
But it worked! I fermented something, for real, and am very excited to try it again. Sort of amazing that I can grow my own good bacteria in a jar! I am planning on doing some more fermentation experiments over the coming months, and will share what I learn here.
Have any of you lacto-fermented foods? Any tips? Great websites? There was not as much information out there as I had expected, so I am guessing this technique is not used all that often. I am eager to learn more so I will have to look into doing some research....

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Blackberry-Plum Fruit Leather

When we arrived back from our travels, we had an abundance of blackberries and the sour plums that grow in our yard.. and I knew that we wouldn't eat them all before they went bad. So, I decide to make some fruit leather.
I took equal part blackberries and pitted yellow plums (I left the skins on), added a little cinnamon and a few tablespoons of honey (to sweeten the sour) and pureed it all in the food processor. It then spent a couple of days in the dehydrator at 135 degrees F.
It came out... sour. Really sour, actually. At first I was a little disappointed, but I like sour, and my kids like sour, and now, a week later, the fruit leather is nearly gone. So, I guess we liked it after all. I think next time I would do the blackberries and plums separately, and mix each one with something sweeter.
Have you made any yummy summer fruit leather combinations this year? Pin It Now!

Pickles!

I have been wanting to learn how to pickle for years... and just have never managed to actually try it. This summer, I was determined. We planted a pickling cucumber, and when our first few fruits began to appear last week, I decide I had better learn what to do with them!
I started easy.. refrigerator pickles. I have canning equipment, and know how to can, but decided that with only one cucumber plant, I would probably never have enough cucumbers ready at one time to make the whole canning process worth it. So, refrigerator pickles it is!
I followed some basic instructions found here. In a 2 quart jar I put sliced cucumbers, jalapenos, garlic, fresh dill, mustard seeds, peppercorns, a bay leaf, a couple grape leaves (supposedly to ensure crispness!). then I poured in a solution of water, brown sugar, white vinegar and white wine vinegar. Shake, refrigerate and wait!

First batch: WAY too sweet

 Well, the first batch came out WAY too sweet for my liking. I was wondering about the brown sugar, and it turns out that it wasn't a good idea.
So, my second batch of pickles was pretty similar, except I used red pepper flakes instead of jalapeno, and I used a solution of white vinegar, water and a small amount of salt.
Batch 2 came out much better. Pretty darn good in fact. I am looking forward to experimenting some more with pickles this summer. Do you have a delicious pickle recipe?

Second Batch: Pretty darn good!

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The Urban Homestead: A Review

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen is 318 pages packed full of wonderfully inspiring information. The book started out with a section on home gardening, and honestly, I was a little bored. Not that it was bad, but I have just read several books on a similar topic and I already do quite a bit of gardening at home. So reading about it wasn't thrilling, and although there were a couple of snippets of new information (like that families of plants use up different nutrients at different rates), but mostly, it was a lot of information that I am already living and breathing.
However, towards the middle of the book there was a section entitled "Revolutionary Home Economics" that I found chock full of great ideas. Some of their preservation techniques that I really want to try include lacto-fermentation, pickling, making vinegars, making ricotta cheese, homemade butters, and country wines (like dandelion wine). There is also an entire section on water and power, both how to reduce your consumption and how to get your own. I thought it was pretty inspiring.
As an overall package, this is probably the best intro to homesteading book that I have read, especially because it is for urbanites (like myself, at least until we can move to a farm!). The ideas in this book are really practical for someone living on a small plot of land. I think that anyone trying to start their own mini-homestead in the middle of a city should get their hands on this one and give it a read. I know that I will be putting it to some use this summer! Pin It Now!