Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

I ended up getting about 3 lbs. of tomatillos from my 3 surviving plants. That's actually not much. Tomatillos are supposed to be very prolific. I blame the deer and chickens for damaging the plants so they didn't yield as well.

Tomatillos keep well in their husks in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. I was able to stash them in there until I had enough saved up for a batch of roasted tomatillo sauce. I got the recipe off the internet, but soon found out this isn't really something that needs a recipe. Everything can be done to taste.

Peel the husks off like 2 or 3 lbs. of tomatillos and rinse them. Lay them out on a baking sheet with some serranos and/or jalapenos (cut the stems off) and peel whole garlic cloves. As you can see, the peppers I used had already turned red, which was not intentional, but I didn't get to them while they were still green.

Put under the broiler until the veggies are getting brown in spots and soften. The tomatillos will sort of get squishy and collapse and the juice will run out. Yum.

Let it cool, and then scrape everything in the blender, making sure to get all the juice in. Add cilantro, salt, and lime juice to taste. Blend until smooth.

I put mine in plastic containers and froze it. You can also water-bath can this, but in that case you'd need to be much more careful with the ratios and use an exact recipe. It's especially important to put enough lime juice in to make it acidic enough to be safe.

I didn't put much lime juice in so I can slather it over enchiladas, but more lime would probably be better if you wanted it as a dip. When I tasted it, it also turned out hotter than I intended. I made the mistake of not de-seeding the peppers, and peppers you grow yourself tend to get hotter when the weather is hotter and the plants are under stress. But otherwise it was really tasty.

Speaking of chickens, one day the neighbor's chickens jumped the back fence (they usually stay in the front), and dug through my herb garden. Then two of them forgot how to get back out and just kept pacing back and forth by the fence like they wanted to go home but forgot they can jump over. Stupid chickens! We had to open the gate and herd them out.

Using Green Tomatoes

I'm still not sure if growing fall tomatoes is worth it. My tomatoes froze before they had a chance to ripen, but I did like using the green tomatoes I picked right before our first freeze. I got several pounds of green tomatoes of all sizes.

First I made Green Tomato Hot Dog Relish, from page 222 of Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving. Not only was it a way to use up the little green tomatoes I ended up with, but I also got to use some of the bell peppers I picked right before it froze. The red and yellow peppers looked nice with the green tomatoes.

The chopped vegetables needed to be salted overnight and then drained. I guess that was to remove excess liquid. They were then cooked with spices, sugar, and vinegar for one hour. Soon my whole house smelled like hot dog relish!

I ended up with five half-pints of relish. Looking forward to trying it out, once I use up the store-bought hot dog relish I already have.

Of course the big green tomatoes were saved for making Fried Green Tomatoes. I had enough for a couple of batches. Some were eaten as a side dish with some Cajun shrimp, and the rest went into making fried green tomato sandwiches. Yum!

Fried green tomatoes are easy to make. Slice the tomatoes into somewhat thick slices. Then dust them in flour, dip them in beaten egg, and then dust them in cornmeal. I pan-fry them in a cast iron skillet on medium or medium-high. You want the outside to be golden brown, and the inside to be cooked through. That way you end up with a nice crunchy coating on the outside, and a hot, tangy, soft cooked green tomato inside. Their good as a side dish with any kind of Southern Soul Food. Like I said, I had mine with shrimp this time, but they're also good with chicken or catfish. You can also make a BLT with friend green tomatoes instead of or in addition to fresh ripe tomatoes.

I know, I know, they're not exactly health food, but this is a once-a-year treat to look forward to when the first freeze kills the tomatoes.

Pear and Apple Mincemeat

One of the Yuletide goodies I made this year that I had never made before were mincemeat pies. I still had some pears left over, and they were starting to go soft. I also had some apples that had been sitting around too long, and a bunch of half-used bags of dried fruit. I hadn't had mincemeat pie since I was a little kid, and Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving has a couple of recipes for mincemeat in it.

I decided to go with the recipe for Pear Mincemeat on page 177, since it made less than the Brandied Fruit Mincemeat, and I didn't have enough fruit to make such a big batch. I also had to make some substitutions, though I think it's OK in these kind of recipes as long as I substitute similar things. I didn't have quite enough almonds, so I used some almonds and some pecans. I used some different dried fruit than what they had listed, but kept the total amount of dried fruit the same. I also used about half pears and half Granny Smith apples instead of all pears. That was mainly because I didn't have enough pears, but I also thought the different textures of the pears and apples would be more interesting.

I ended up with four and a half pints. I kept the half-full one in the fridge to use right away.

Next I had to find a recipe for mincemeat pie. The pies I enjoyed as a kid came frozen in a box, baked in the oven by my grandmother on Thanksgiving. I searched for a pie recipe, and found this mincemeat pie recipe from Joyofbaking.com. I liked the idea of making little individual pies instead of one big pie, and the stars on top are really cute.

The recipe worked out great, with one minor problem: the crust-to-filling ratio seemed all wrong. I made the crust exactly like it said, except for using brandy instead of water (a trick I just learned to make foolproof tender pie crusts - alcohol inhibits gluten formation!), but it only made enough to make 9 pies, not 24, and I used one and a half pints of mincemeat (the half-full one I had in the fridge, plus another pint jar I opened up), not only one cup like the recipe says.

Turns out it was because I used a standard muffin tin, not a mini muffin tin like the recipe says! Oh well, mine still turned out delicious, so delicious I forgot to take pictures of the finished product! I think I like it better this way, rather than making such tiny tarts. Making it in a standard muffin tin made each one a nice single-serving size. The star cookie cutter I have was just the right size for the top, and 9 single serving size tarts was more than enough for the number of guests I had.

Now I have three more pints of mincemeat for next year.

Pear Butter

About a month ago my husband's boss gave us a big sack of pears off his trees, about 10 or 12 pounds worth. They sat for quite a while in the garage fridge waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.

I decided to use up some of them to make pear butter.

I used the recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. They have a recipe for peach butter, with a pear butter variation in the footnotes. They also have a variation that uses amaretto liqueur, which sounds delicious, but I decided to go with regular pear butter for my first time.

The recipe called for "7 lbs. of pears, peeled, cored, and chopped." What annoys me about these sorts of recipes is that they don't tell you if it's 7 lbs. before or after you peel and core them! I'd much prefer if they told me how much to have after they are peeled and cored. Much more precise that way. I mean, how do they know how much peel or core you're removing?

So I started peeling and coring and chopping them, weighing them as I went, until I got to about 5 lbs., which started to make my pot look quite full. I decided they probably meant weight before peeling and coring, so I stopped there.

I still have plenty of pears to use for other things.

First the pears are cooked in half a cup of water, and the juice and zest of one lemon. Instead of water I used apple cider. Thought it would make it tastier that way.

Once they are soft, you're supposed to puree them. After trying to puree hot soup in a blender before and getting a nasty surprise, I decided to use the stick blender this time. This actually turned out to be harder than I thought. I think stick blenders work well on more liquidy stuff, but it was a pain getting all the chunks worked out of these pears.

After pureeing, I added the 4 cups of sugar, juice and zest of 1 orange, and 1 tsp. (approximately, since I grate it myself) of nutmeg. Then comes the part where you cook it and cook it and cook it until it thickens. Same as with the pumpkin butter, this took a really really long time. I actually ran out of time, had to stop, put it in the fridge, and finish it off on another day.

Finally, it was done, at least to my satisfaction. You can see here it got much darker in color, I'm guessing due to caramelization. Next I loaded it up into sterilized jars and canned it in my steam canner.

As usual, it seems every time I can things, I end up with extra jars. I managed to fill 10 jelly jars instead of 8 like the recipe said. I always sterilize an extra two jars because of this. I really don't know why it always ends up that way.

Here is the finished product. I sent one jar back with my husband to give to his boss in return for giving us the pears. As with the pumpkin butter, my favorite thing to do with this stuff is mix it into oatmeal. It has a nice flavor with the citrus peels and nutmeg. Next time I get a huge load of pears, I'll try the amaretto variation.

So Many Jalapenos

I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do with all the jalapenos I harvested right before our first frost. I've made two batches of jalapeno jelly and one batch of pickled jalapenos and still have a couple of pounds left. I made my second batch of jelly with only red jalapenos, and I think it turned out prettier than the green jelly. This is the batch I'll use for gifts. I'm becoming more interested in savory jellies. I just found a recipe for garlic jelly and may make a batch of that too. I still have plenty of garlic to use up, and I've heard garlic jelly is good on steak. I also just made hamburgers for dinner last night and put some of my tomato jam on it that I made with my yellow pear tomatoes. Tomato jam is like ketchup in jam form (and much easier to make that true ketchup).

For the pickled jalapenos I cut three pounds into slices and soaked them in Pickle Crunch overnight, then canned them in a pretty simple brine of vinegar, water, and salt. The recipe called for a few spices too, but I left them out because I wanted just plain jalapeno flavor.

As usual, I ended up with more jars than the recipe stated, cramming nine pints full. I had to can them in two batches since my canner fits seven pints at most. They turned out pretty with a mix of red and green slices, like Christmas jalapenos.

I still have over two pounds of jalapenos left, and only a couple of canning jars left. They need to be used up soon. They're already starting to look a little less than fresh. I could freeze them, or I could go ahead and break down and buy another dozen canning jars and can another half-batch of jalapenos, then freeze what's left over.

Strangely enough, my jalapeno plants are still alive after several freezes. They don't look well, but they're hanging on. I guess so far the freezes have been light. I haven't done anything to help them, either. I haven't even been watering them, and we haven't had significant rainfall since September. If I was actually taking care of them, I wonder if they'd survive the winter.

Still Harvesting Okra

October has been very dry so far. It hasn't rained since late September. We've had sunny, clear days with very low humidity, which means it gets chilly at night. Feels nice to me, but I think it's slowed down the growth of my plants. I think most plants prefer things warm and wet, not cool and dry (but cool and dry is still better than hot and dry).

But the okra keeps going! This past weekend I tried making some pickled okra, but I don't think it went too well. It's hard to pick okra at just the right stage. The pods grow very quickly, and in order to have good pickled okra, they have to be pretty small. At least they need to not be too long to fit in the jars.

I ended up with enough okra to loosely fill three jars (you can see they were loosely filled by how much they floated up when the liquid was added). I cheated a little with some of them, trimming off the pointy tips, though I think okra pods are supposed to be pickled whole. I'm afraid slicing into them will allow slime to escape into the pickle brine and cause weirdness somehow. I guess the only way to know for sure is to taste them after they've sat a bit.

Another weird thing is that I'm growing a red variety of okra (Bowling Red from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds), and the red seems to have "bled" out into the pickle brine, leaving the pods green. I didn't expect them to keep their vibrant, pretty color through the pickling process (most red and purple vegetables, like purple green beans for example, turn green or at least fade when cooked), but I wasn't expecting pink pickle juice.

However, most of my okra was much too long to fit in the jars at all. I guess I could have put them in quart jars instead of pints, but the other reason you want small pods is because they're the most tender. The only cooking these pods got was the ten minutes they spent getting sealed. I ended up with a lot more pods that were too big for pickling but still tender enough to cook, so I sliced and froze them.

I just spread the sliced okra out on parchment on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer. I put them into containers after they were frozen. This is supposed to keep them from sticking together, but I bet some of them will stick together anyway. I didn't blanch them or anything like that since I thought that was just asking for slime. It's not that I don't like okra slime, but the slime still must be managed, especially if you're messing with your okra a lot (forcing them to go through traumas like slicing and freezing and pickling).

I did get some pods that were too far gone even for this. It's amazing how an okra pod can go from tiny to woody so fast. It also seems to vary with individual pods, so I can't really say, "they're good when under X inches" or something like that. I've sliced into some long ones that seemed fine, and others that were shorter and were hard when I tried to slice them (those go into the compost... I found out from personal experience that hardened okra doesn't get soft again with cooking). Basically, if the knife goes through with no resistance, it's good. If the pod goes "CRUNCH" when the knife comes down, and I have to use any effort to cut through, it's no good anymore. I'm not sure what makes some pods harden before others. It probably has to do with environmental conditions when the pod was growing. Since it's so dry out there, I wouldn't be surprised if the plants are stressed, and the pods are getting tough quicker than normal.

Another frustrating thing about okra is that it gets a few pods at a time. In order to save up enough for a full canning batch, I'd have to be out there picking small okra pods every day for a long time, maybe long enough that the first few I picked are moldy before I have enough (okra doesn't have a long fridge life after picking). One solution is to have more plants, so I have more pods at any one time, but that also means more okra overall. Maybe there's some other trick I can figure out.

My plants are still producing, but I think I'm done with pickling okra for this year. I'll see how my three experimental jars do first. Maybe next year I should try a different variety for canning, something that has shorter, green pods. As for the rest of this year's harvest, I might try drying some and see how those turn out. I wonder how well dehydrated okra will rehydrate for use in gumbo or curry.

UPDATE: These okra pickles didn't turn out good. Slicing the ends off made a lot of slime ooze out into the pickling liquid. It looks like it's completely necessary to use okra that's short enough to fit in the jars whole.

Watermelon Update

Here is the smaller of my two watermelons when I cut it open. Look! It worked! It's a real watermelon! This melon was nice and sweet, but with lots of small seeds (I guess mini melons also make mini seeds) in meandering, irregular rows (most watermelons have their seeds in neat, regular rows). Oh well, at least it was edible. I will assume the larger, prettier one is even better. Alas, as you can see from the picture, the rind is so thin as to be pretty much useless for pickling.

Speaking of pickles, I also tried one of my watermelon rind pickles, from the not-quite-full-enough jar that ended up in the fridge instead of being canned. It was good too! So much for having to wait until Christmas for decent flavor. And to my relief, it wasn't apple pie filling-like at all. The pickle was nice and crisp (from now on I'm always using Pickle Crunch for my pickles!) and tasted like a bread and butter pickle, maybe a little sweeter, but had a definite vinegar tang. I could see it easily working as a culinary stand-in for bread and butter cucumber pickles. Gosh, I LOVED bread and butter pickles when I was a kid. Ah, memories.

I'm still in the market for a better watermelon variety, though. Blacktail Mountain seems too "modern", with it's thin rind and miniature size and 76 day maturation time. I'm thinking I could do fine growing an old fashioned, great big watermelon with big, fat, spittable seeds and a thick rind for pickle-making. Blacktail Mountain's place seems to be more for Northern growers who need a fast-maturing melon that tolerates chilly nights (after all, it was developed in Idaho). Not my problem here in Texas. Two small melons and vines that died as soon as the weather got hot just didn't impress me. But that's the great thing about heirloom and open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties, they are NOT one size fits all.

At least, I really hope that was my problem here, and not that I just have a black thumb when it comes to watermelons. This was my first watermelon-growing adventure, after all. I'm just left wondering that if I grew a bigger variety, would I have still ended up with only two fruits, except those fruits would have been 30 or 40 pounds instead of 6? I would be ok with that. Ending up with NO fruits, that would be a problem.

Watermelon Rind Pickles

As you probably know, my country is currently in the worst economic times since the Great Depression. It’s a different world now, and the tricks people used to survive back then won’t always work today. However, having been hit by The Third Depression myself, I have been trying to live by some of the principles of frugality that helped people back then. They tend to neatly align with this new trendy “green” thing as well. I’ve already mentioned my rain barrel, but my clothesline should also get some credit (not using the dryer saves double energy in the summer, since I’m not using the electricity for the dryer or using extra electricity for the AC to cool down the house because of the hot dryer), and since I have some more time on my hands, I might as well put some more effort into my garden, and into cooking everything from scratch.

One good practice is using up everything you’ve got and letting nothing go to waste. I already make my own chicken stock regularly out of saved chicken bones (from buying whole chickens and cutting them up myself instead of using pre-cut chicken pieces), and I skim the fat off the top and use that as a cooking fat, and then finally the bones, after giving up all they had to give, go in the compost pile where they can give even more.

But now I’ve really outdone myself. It started when I scored a free watermelon at my part time farmer’s market job a couple of weeks ago (which is the only job I’ve managed to land since being let go from my last internship in March). The watermelon farmer didn’t want to drag home his leftovers at the end of the day, so asked the other vendors and employees there to please take some of them. Since my sweetie is watching his carbohydrates, and despite my argument that watermelon is good for you so he should eat some, I ended up having to consume the entire melon myself, and this was a real watermelon, not one of those little seedless things that are becoming more popular. As I feasted on watermelon salad, watermelon smoothies, and of course just plain watermelon for days, instead of throwing the rind into the compost pile, which is where most people would think it should go, I saved it up in the fridge to try out a recipe I saw on the National Center for Home Food Preservation website, watermelon rind pickles.

Yes, let us rethink our definitions of what is edible and what is waste, and perhaps find a tasty treat in the process. After all, saving up all my chicken bones has been working out quite well. Why not watermelon rinds? And just like how the “green” trend is mostly rediscovering and updating some very old practices, watermelon rind pickles is a very old recipe that still may be known by a few old southern grandmas somewhere. (I hope that doesn’t sound condescending. I never got the chance to have recipes handed down from grandmas, so I’m jealous. I have to start everything from scratch.)

I have been trying some other “alternative” pickles since my cucumber crop didn’t really manifest. I’ve made pickled beets, which were already known to my family, though not the canned version, and then I made “dilly beans” out of a bunch of green beans I got from my farmer, which seem to be a fairly standard dill pickle recipe but using green beans instead of cucumbers. I was going to pickle some okra too, since I always love it when salad bars have pickled okra. They taste like they’re probably using a similar recipe to bread and butter pickles, but with okra. Except then I ended up using my okra in gumbo, and then freezing some pre-breaded okra for quick fried okra in the future. I haven’t gotten around to pickling it yet, and now it’s so hot that my okra plants have slowed production way down. Maybe they will pick up again this fall.

Watermelon rind pickles are quite different from these other pickles, though. While pickled beets, green beans, and okra seem to be the same basic pickle recipes I’m familiar with, substituting a different vegetable for the usual cucumbers, the watermelon rind pickle recipe struck me as being kind of weird. For one thing, while making dilly beans can take an afternoon, these watermelon rind pickles were a multi-day process. True, most of that wasn’t active time, but these pickles needed two different overnight soaks!

I was tempted to take some kind of shortcut, but then I realized that I really shouldn’t tamper with ancient pickling wisdom, so I followed the recipe to the letter, with two exceptions. On the first soak where the rinds soak in salt water, I also added Pickle Crunch to the brine. It’s supposed to keep pickled veggies firmer, and the directions on it said to soak the veggies overnight in it before pickling, so I combined that with the salt water soak. The last time I made cucumber pickles they were really mushy, so from now on I’m going to be using Pickle Crunch. After the salt water soak, the rinds are then drained, covered with clean water, and boiled for 10 minutes. To remove the salt? I don’t know, but I did that, and while that’s going you make the vinegar/syrup type stuff. Here’s where I diverged from the recipe one more time. I always use apple cider vinegar for pickling instead of distilled white. It has the same % acidity, but with a much nicer flavor. The liquid was half vinegar and half water, and a full NINE CUPS of sugar! Brought that to a boil to dissolve, with six cinnamon sticks, a full tablespoon of cloves, and a sliced lemon. The rinds were drained again, covered with the hot vinegar-sugar mixture, and put back in the refrigerator for another overnight soak.

The next day, the pot was once again pulled out of the fridge, and this time the whole thing was brought to a boil and simmered for a full hour! I don’t know why these watermelon rinds need to be cooked so much, but it sure did make the house smell good. They smell nothing like watermelon, just a mixture of lemon, clove, and cinnamon, and a little apple cider vinegar. The smell was almost Christmas-like, like mincemeat pie or fruitcake. Weird thing to smell when it’s 103 degrees outside.

Then I got to break in my new steam canner! Yes, ancient pickling recipes combined with the latest in pickling technology! Works with anything you use a boiling water canner for, but with a fraction of the water, which saves a lot of energy not having to boil so much water. And steam is actually hotter than boiling water, isn’t it? As you may remember from my post on pickled beets, I’m finally getting some jar breakage, which may be because I haven’t been using a real canner, just a big stockpot where the jars bump around as they process. I decided to invest in an actual canner, and here the jars sit on a rack nice and still and not bumping into each other.

After the rinds got their second cook, I strained them out and put them in pint jars along with one cinnamon stick for each jar, then poured in the syrup. The weirdest thing about these so-called “pickles” is that the juice is not a salty-vinegary concoction, but really is syrup. I ended up with six pints of pickles, and a little extra left, with about a quart of extra syrup. Not sure how that happened. I did weigh out the watermelon rind to make sure I got really close to the six pounds called for by the recipe, and it was darn close. In the spirit of not wasting anything, I saved the extra syrup. No idea what I’ll do with it yet. Any ideas on what to do with a lemon, cinnamon, clove flavored syrup?

I steamed my jars for 10 minutes, and they started popping as soon as I took the lid off the canner. They’re good and sealed, and I don’t have a huge pot of hot water to deal with. I like my steam canner already.

I started looking around on the internet for more information on watermelon rind pickles, like what to do with them once you have them, and found one blog post where someone tried it, ate some of the pickles right away, and said they were disgusting and threw them all out. Someone else commented saying that when their grannies made watermelon rind pickles in the summer, they never ate them until Christmas or at least Thanksgiving. It seems they need to “cure” a bit to reach peak deliciousness.

I might eat my little dab of extra pickles that weren’t enough to fill another jar after they’ve sat in the fridge for a couple of weeks, but the rest are being saved until Christmas. Aren't they pretty in their jars with their cinnamon sticks? They turned out surprisingly yellow. I did taste some of the pickle juice, and it is very sweet. Not anything like pickle juice from dill pickles or bread and butter pickles or even pickled beets. I have a feeling these will turn out more like pie filling than pickles, so I’m not sure what to do with them. Any ideas? Put them on ice cream? Glaze my Yule ham with them?

Weird, but I feel my culinary horizons have been expanded.

In closing, you may be thinking, “Weren’t you growing your own watermelons?” Well, yeah, I tried, but last week when I prodded my largest specimen, the vine fell off. My watermelon vines are dead, and all but two of the fruits were obviously rotted. I took the two non-rotten fruits in the house, worrying they may not have gotten a chance to ripen, but after washing them off and letting them sit on the counter for a while I’m getting more optimistic. Here’s how they look now:

They don’t look too bad, besides being puny. Maybe they did ripen. The one on the right looks the best. The one on the left is smaller, darker, and has some slight ribbing like a pumpkin or something, which is weird. I’m a bit afraid to cut one open, though, afraid I might find something other than juicy, sweet, crimson watermelon goodness. You can see I am perhaps still traumatized by my disgusting rotten squash incidents. Anyway, I think Blacktail Mountain is not the watermelon variety for me. Not a good idea for me to get varieties (of anything) that brag about cold tolerance. Some sort of classic southern heirloom watermelon would probably be the way to go, like Rattlesnake or Moon and Stars. I went ahead and put Blacktail Mountain on my GardenWeb trade list to see if I can find my remaining seeds a better home

The Peach Harvest and Salsa Amarillo

Last week my CSA farmer invited me to pick peaches in exchange for taking some of the bruised ones home that wouldn't sell at the farmer's market. I ended up with an overflowing box of them. I'm not sure how many pounds I got, but it was a lot. I had to scramble to use them up before they rotted.

I made a couple of different jams, Peach Cardamom Jam and Peach Rum Preserves. I went ahead and left the skins on my peaches when I used them. The skin is so thin, I don't think it does any harm.

Also made a celebratory peach cobbler, and filled up the dehydrator twice over with peaches (stored the finished ones in the Mason jars shown here). It was hard to not eat all the dried peaches straight out of the dehydrator!

And finally, being a chile lover, I made a little concoction I'm going to call Salsa Amarillo, or maybe I should call it Salsa Melocotón, but I like Salsa Amarillo. I've heard of Salsa Roja (salsa made with red tomatoes) and Salsa Verde (salsa made with tomatillos), but I haven't heard of Salsa Amarillo, and a Googling only came up with a recipe that was the same as tomato salsa except it used yellow tomatoes instead of red.

My yellow salsa is special because it's made with peaches along with the yellow tomatoes. I modified this recipe, halving all the amounts just in case it didn't turn out well, using yellow pear tomatoes from my garden, yellow bell peppers from my CSA bag, and ripe orange Serrano peppers instead of green jalapenos. I thought since the peaches were pretty sweet, this salsa could stand up to some extra heat, because sweetness tends to mellow out chile heat.

I ended up with five 12 oz jars of salsa plus a little more to eat as soon as it was chilled. It was really tasty, but could have used more heat. It was only medium-hot, and I was going for a pretty hot salsa. I think next year I won't halve the recipe, and use orange Habaneros instead of Serranos to make it good and hot.

I love peach season. When I have my own place I am definitely planting peach trees.

Pickled Beets

The first act of canning for 2010 turned out to be pickled beets. I've always liked pickled beets, though when I was a kid my mom made them by taking a can of beets and marinading them overnight. I first canned some back when I had a job taking down the Austin Farmer's Market during the summer, and we'd get a lot of leftover veggies the vendors didn't want to drag home. One weekend I got a big sack of beets, and another I got a sack of pickling cucumbers, so I had to learn how to can.

So far I have only done boiling water canning, which works for pickles, tomato products like salsa and pasta sauce, and jams and jellies. Other foods need a pressure canner which I don't have since they cost $200 or more.

Even though you can get boiling water canners that are specifically for that purpose, I've just been using my big stock pot. The advantage is I already had it, and I can use it for lots of other stuff besides canning. The disadvantage is that it doesn't have a rack to hold the jars in place, so they knock around a bit in there while boiling, which makes them more likely to break.

Except I haven't had a breakage for four years of boiling water canning, so I should be fine.

Before you can anything, your jars need to be sterilized. If you're getting your jars straight out of the dishwasher, they'll be OK, but mine were sitting around in the cabinet, so I boiled them for 10 minutes.

You also have to sterilize your bands and lids, except the lids shouldn't boil because that breaks down the rubber seal. You should only let them come up to a simmer. What I do is put them in a smaller saucepan, wait for the water in my stock pot to boil, and then ladle some boiling water over the lids in the saucepan and put them on low heat with a lid on. That seems to keep them at a nice, gentle simmer until I'm ready for them.

Also, I always go ahead and boil a full pot of jars (which is seven for pints), even if I don't think I'll use them all. I've found that I never end up with the exact amount of end product the recipe says I will, and boiling one more jar because you ended up with enough stuff to fill five instead of four is a pain and uses up a lot of extra energy. If you boil extra jars and don't need them all, you can just stick the extra back in the cabinet.

Canning jars and bands are reusable, if your family and friends cooperate and actually give you back your jars when they're done with them! So they may seem expensive, but they will last for years if you manage to hang onto them. The lids, however, are not reusable. The squishy rubber seal only works once.

The only specialized equipment I have for canning, besides the actual jars/bands/lids of course, are these three gadgets which really help when you're working with hot glass and metal objects that have been sitting in boiling liquids! In the front is a lid lifter, which is really just a magnet on a stick, to get the lids and bands out of their boiling water bath. On the left is the jar lifter, which is so named because it allows you to lift the jars out of the boiling water. The black part is the handle, and the blue part grips the jar around the rim. On the right is a canning funnel, which is not totally necessary but makes it a lot easier to neatly pour hot jam or pickling brine into jars without a drop getting on the rim and possibly compromising the seal. It also has a handy line inside to show you how high to fill your jars so you have the right amount of headspace (an air pocket you need between the surface of the food and the lid of the jar so you can get a proper seal; too much or too little are both not good).

I used a combination of recipes for my pickled beets. For the most part, I used the National Center for Home Food Preservation's pickled beet recipe, except I halved it because I only had 3-4 lbs. of beets from the garden. Instead of boiling the beets, however, I roasted them like Alton Brown does in his refrigerator pickled beet recipe but without the oil and herbs. I just don't like boiling vegetables. It leaks all the goodness out. I bet it would be OK steaming them too. I sorted them for size since I had some puny ones from my CSA with the big ones from my garden, so I could take the smaller ones out of the oven sooner.

The beets are cooked whole with the skin on, and then after they're cooled the peel loosens up, and it's very easy to pull it off with your fingers. Though I warn you, it WILL look like you have murdered someone in your kitchen once you're done.

The brine boiled while I skinned my beets and realized why this variety of beet is called "Bull's Blood". The brine has water, salt, sugar, cloves, and a cinnamon stick.

The recipe says you're supposed to boil the beets in the brine and then pour them in the jars, but that's messy and difficult when you're dealing with large pieces of food, so this time I layered the sliced beets and a sliced onion in there first and then poured the hot brine over using the canning funnel. I ended up with enough veggies for five jars.

To seal the jars, you put the lids on, then screw the bands on just finger tight. You don't want to screw them on too tight, because the bands are just there to hold the lids on, while allowing air to escape. As the jars boil, the air expands and bubbles out. When you take the jars out of the hot water, the air that's left inside cools, condenses since gases condense when they cool, and sucks the lid onto the jar creating a tight seal. It's SCIENCE!

The NCHFP says I have to boil jars of pickled beets for a full 30 minutes, which was unexpectedly long. Jams only take 10 minutes. Oh well, I don't want to argue with the experts and risk botulism, so I did as I was told. After a few minutes, I got worried as the water in the pot turned pink...

BREAKAGE!

Great, so the first time I decide to blog my canning is also the first time I get jar breakage! The bottom of this jar blew out, and broken glass, beets, onions, and pickle juice spilled out into the pot. At least it was contained. I pulled out the jar (what was left of it), but left everything else alone until the 30 minutes were up. I pulled the survivors out, and poured the rest of the contents of the pot through a strainer into the sink, to catch the mixture of vegetables and broken glass so it could go into the trash.

And here are the four survivors. When you pull the jars out of the water, after a minute or two (sometimes sooner, sometimes longer) you should here a "POP"! That's the air condensing and popping the lids down. It means you did good. I'm glad to say all four survivors popped and therefore were successfully canned. I waited until they were cool before I washed off the outside to get any more broken glass and sticky sugar solution off. I didn't want to pour cool water over the hot jars and cause any more thermal shocks.

I guess I should start looking into buying a real canner with a rack to keep my jars from banging together. They're built to be boiled and cooled many, many times, but there's only so much abuse a little ol' Mason jar can take.