Weekend Canning Report

The red sauerkraut we started about two months ago was ready to can. Since we had the hot water canner all set up, we also decided to make guava jam, something I had been intending to do for the past week with a bagful of pineapple guavas generously given to us by friends. All of this started around 9 PM on a Sunday, so it was a late night canning extravaganza!

The boy and I have a good canning rhythm now. One person can lift the jars while the other one readies the funnel. One person fills the cans as the other person digs into the simmering water for the lids. Our first attempts were miserable because even with two of us we felt like we needed a more hands. Getting more thermometers has helped, too.

The pineapple guava jam is delicious! I had my doubts as it seemed to take forever to get to the gelling point and I was worried that the long cooking time would dilute the fruit taste and result in guava caramel, but I dipped a spoon into some of the uncanned jam this morning and my worries went down as easy as the jam. Washing, cutting, and scooping out the flesh was such a chore that I would have choked down the jam even if it was nasty, but thankfully no forcing down the gullet is necessary.

Now, my crock is empty and I am trying to figure out what will inhabit it next. Kim chi sounds awfully appealing, except for the fact that I'm entirely sketched out by the addition of seafood to the cabbage mixture. Plus, I'm worried that subsequent batches of sauerkraut will taste like kim chi many generations later.

I made a few Internet inspired recipes this weekend, too. These baked sweet potato fries were good, but definitely not as good as their deep friend or skillet fried cousins. I thought that the 20 additional minutes on a low oven temperature sounded like a promising way to achieve a crispy outside, but my fries were still soggy. I also tried this "just like Starbucks" pumpkin spice latte, and while it wasn't just like Starbucks, it was good. It would have been better if I didn't run out of vanilla extract. Surprisingly, the pumpkin pulp did not make for a grainy coffee, even though I was using a whisk and not a blender to assemble my drink. Adding a couple tablespoons of pumpkin pulp also made me really full after drinking my cup of joe. I guess that's one way to get fiber into your diet!

Roast-O-Rama

Yesterday's high temperature was 49°F, and since our house has virtually no insulation, the temperature inside was practically the same. Mingus is the only happy one when the temperature dips. The rest of us pile on clothing, huddle together, and in my case, roast.

Roasting is the silver lining to a cold house. I crank the oven up, and then let it produce braised meats, vegetables with lovely caramelized bits, and breads. I do minimal prep work, too, and the pace is so slow that it's easy to clean as I go, knit, and read a book (all the while huddled up to the oven).

Sadly, I have no pictures of the braised lamb shoulder I made last Saturday. The braising liquid contained mandarin zest, ginger, a cinnamon stick, bay leaves, and some honey. It was falling off of the bones - so good! If someone can inform me how I am supposed to carve a lamb shoulder, though, please do! It was so pretty in the pot, but since it had no structure after being braised at 300°F for 5 hours, it fell apart if you just looked at it funny.

I took better blog notes on Sunday so I could share with you a typical roasting day. I was able to pick up all of my produce from the Riverdog Farm booth at the Berkeley Farmers' Market.

Happily, the produce that is in season - Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, winter squashes, beets - is just begging to be roasted. I started my roast-o-rama by heating up the oven to 450°F. Once the oven temperatures was stable, in went the halved Brussels sprouts for 40 minutes. Since I had some leftover lamb fat from the night before, I decided to use that fat instead of olive oil or bacon grease to coat them. I also gave them a generous sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper. They turned out delicious!

Next was the cauliflower, roasted for 35 minutes. Roasted cauliflower is a treat I enjoy almost year round here. This time, I coated them with my favorite Bariani olive oil, course sea salt, and ground pepper.

After the cauliflower was roasted, I cranked the oven temperature down to 350°F and popped in the pumpkin, pumpkin seeds (tossed with olive oil, cayenne powder, cumin, and salt), and whole garlic. The pumpkin seeds were done in 30 minutes and the pumpkin and garlic took about an hour.



I'll scrape out the pumpkin flesh and make either gnocci, ravioli filling, or a soup, the roasted garlic will go into just about everything this week - vampires (and friends) beware, and the seeds will probably top our salads and be useful for snacky moments.

We put up some red saurkraut yesterday, too. Since the organic red cabbage was on sale for 1/2 the price of the green ones, we decided to experiment. I'm really happy with how it turned out! Shades of crimson are my favorite colors, so hopefully I'll get tired of looking at the canned kraut soon and will use it for a meal.

If we were farmers, we would starve

The boy and I spent our 3 day weekend building up our set of homesteading skills. Wistfully, we talk about how great it would be if we could eat from our garden almost year round. Well, unless we want to thrive on lemons and weeds (hey,we'll never have scurvy!), we have a long way to go. Yet, hope springs eternal and we spent many therapeutic hours working in our wanna be garden.

Our tomatoes are sad and few. At last count, there were 4 of them. I picked a variety, sweetwater select, that is compact (perfect for a container) and that can fruit in the fog. Grow, damn it, grow! I dream of making Harriet the Spy sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise, freshly baked bread, and homegrown tomatoes.

The boy grew this little gem lettuce from seed. I never buy lettuce at the produce stand, mainly because I find making salads boring, so lettuce never finds its way into my produce cart. The boy decided to grow his own greens so he wouldn't have to beg me for salad greens.


We also planted an embarrassment of chard. I've witnessed chard growing in the most neglected spaces around my neighborhood, so I figured it would be the perfect vegetable for us. I planted both golden and ruby chard. This is our second try because our first attempt was mowed down by some unidentified slugs. Those damn slugs hide well... I even went outside at night armed with a flashlight and a bucket of soapy water in the hopes of catching the little vegetable stealers at work, but no luck. This time, we planted the chard (which is so easy to start from seed) in pots on our deck. These specimens are about 3 weeks old.

Citrus is the one plant I have no trouble growing at our place. We grow meyer lemons, key limes, and kaffir limes in wine barrels. The kaffir limes rarely fruit, however, that is fine since I am really only interested in their fragrant leaves. You can add kaffir leaves to Southeast Asian foods for a perfumy, citrus kick.

Our meyer lemon tree is going all out this year. I am excited! It's also chock full of bees right now, so the boy and I can smugly say that we're doing our part for the bee crisis.


We also spent a fair amount of time in our front yard


and the backyard. Those leafy, green plants kissing the ferns are wild ginger. My task was to propagate as much of the wild ginger as I could along the rest of the hillside. It grows slowly, but since it is naturally paired with coastal redwoods (the majority of our yard has one of these), it thrives. Unfortunately, it isn't an easy plant to find at our local nurseries, and when we do find it, we never want to spend that much money on something we can get for free, however slow the process may be to reproduce it. Supposedly, you can make a tea from the ginger leaves, but I have not tried it yet.


While at a drugstore, we found a cushion that covers up the missing black paint on our bookcases. Mingus is to blame, for he spends hours each day laying on top of the bookcase and looking out the windows. We've already repainted the bookcase once with an epoxy paint, but he still managed to scratch that away, too. Since this cushion's is for outdoor furniture, it's made of tough material! When summer patio furniture goes on sale, I am so going to be raiding all the stores since these cushions also make for cheap dog and cat beds. Wouldn't the colors of the cushion make great sock yarn???!


Our biggest weekend adventure was teaching ourselves how to can. I'm already having panic attacks about the end of summer fruit, and the boy is always interested in yet another self sufficiency skill to add to our bag of tricks, so we decided that we had to learn. The equipment was relatively cheap, and it was all found at our local hardware store. Our first canning attempt was to can the rest of our sauerkraut. I think it turned out well, but yet again, Mingus is not impressed.

In fact, he was quite embarrassed that we'd go through all this work just for cabbage.


Oh well, I don't expect him to understand.