Posts Tagged canning

Little Suzie Homemaker Is Tired

This used to be 25 lbs of galas, but we've been snacking them pretty hard all week. It's still a lot of apples.

This used to be 25 lbs of galas, but we've been snacking them pretty hard all week. It's still a lot of apples.

Over budget.

Spent this week: $165.46
Spent in the past 24 hours: $0

Same old song. We would have been okay, if not for the Thai food.

We spent $110.46 on groceries. That includes $10 worth of ice cream and $6 worth of orange juice. (Pregnancy tax.) We spent $28 at the farm stand of our favorite no-spray u-pick. Their u-pick is over for the season, but they’ve got great deals right now on stuff that’s already picked. That is, 25% anything you buy by the case. We go through gala apples like water around here, and apples keep well on our nice, cold (unheated, uninsulated) sun porch. We got 25 lbs of beautiful organic (minus the pricey certificate) gala apples for $18. That $18 puts us outside of our budget, but we won’t have to buy apples for a few weeks and I’m also going to make and can a few batches of apple butter, which will extend our quickly dwindling toast spread stash. (Must also finish making jam from the rest of the frozen blueberries, and get started on the marionberries.) Bonus: the sunporch now smells very strongly of cold apples. The other $10 was spent on Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, some kind of hot pepper that Billy will eat alone because I don’t care for them, and some gorgeous bartlett pears. We’ve still got half the broccoli and cauliflower, and those peppers, so that $10 goes toward feeding us next week, too… So there was some spending this week that will translate to lower costs in the coming weeks. All that is fine.

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So what DO you do with a garden full of green tomatoes?

The answer, today anyway, is pickles.

I put up three quarts of pickled green cherry tomatoes:

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There's something vaguely gruesome about pickling, isn't there?

There's something vaguely gruesome about pickling, isn't there?

And two and a half quarts of pickled green tomato wedges:

That half-filled jar bugs me. If only I'd sliced a few more tomatoes!

That half-filled jar bugs me. If only I'd sliced a few more tomatoes!

I (sort of, more or less) followed a recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Besides leaving out all kinds of spicy peppers that I don’t care for (sorry, Billy), and upping the garlic a bit, I also opted to put the pickling spices directly into the pickling liquid, rather than tie it up in cheesecloth and remove it before jarring. I think the spices look pretty floating around in the jar, don’t you?

I’m making fried green tomatoes as a side dish for dinner tonight (to serve with: lentil mung bean dal, brown rice, raita, and sauteed kale with garlic). That will leave a whole lot of tomatoes still. Some have already ripened nicely while they sat in paper bags in the sun porch, waiting for me to have time to do something with them, so I think the bulk of what’s left will be allowed to ripen. It’ll be nice to still be eating tomatoes from the garden as the weather gets colder. I doubt I’ll make any more pickles. Maybe some chutney… Maybe we’ll just develop a fried green tomato habit…


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Cari’s spending, plus: What to do when California gives you lemons

It’s two posts in one! Two posts in one! Oh, an exciting day. You’re welcome, dear ones.

Let’s leave the budgety stuff for last and get right down to the lemons, yeah?

sliced-lemons

Lemons. As you may recall, I came home from California with eight contraband lemons stowed in my bag. What? I didn’t mention anything about contraband before? Well, maybe they weren’t, going in the northerly direction. After all, Oregon is a pretty laid back, pragmatic kind of place. (I did smuggle apples and bananas into California on the way in, though. Going from Oregon into California on I-5, they stop you at the border and ask if you have any fresh fruit or plants in your car. “No, ma’am.” I wasn’t technically lying at the time, because I’d forgotten we had a bag of fruit in the back seat. But we did. So there you go. Turns out illegal fruit is much tastier than its tamer law-abiding cousins.)

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Do Not Try This At Home Unless You Want to Die a Horrible Death

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One of the small truths that writing a food blog has brought home to me is that they can’t all be delicious. It’s the tendency of the food blogger to err towards the Martha Stewart, to make every meal lovely and wonderful with bright, authentic flavors surrounded by the sort of blown-out backgrounds that suggest the catalogs of furniture stores slightly more expensive than you can actually afford. White scarves, green fields. Thoughtful expressions, balanced with bright, laughing smiles. Bottles of herb-infused oils. You know, advertising.

This is not that kind of blog.

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Welcome to the Cannery

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We went strawberry picking this weekend. It was the day before the kid’s third birthday. The weather was cool and dry. The Hood River strawberries had just come into season. I’d been wanting to give jam-making a try. How could we not go?

This is what we came home with:

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