Category: canning

Catching up.

1 Comment
Since I last visited this space, we have had a few adventures.
Going to pick up Edie from camp was the first.
After last year’s camp closing ceremonies, Edie announced that her goal for this year was to be recognized for archery at the closing ceremony.  Which she was.  Her face as her name was called for that was absolutely beaming.  She was quite proud of herself, as were we. Is there anything better than seeing the satisfaction of your child’s face when they hit a goal they set for themselves?  She was also recognized for Dance & Lacrosse.  She was surprised by the lacrosse recognition as she doesn’t care for the sport.  I told her she didn’t have to like it to be good at it, but wasn’t it nice to know that if she wanted to play it she’d be good at it?  She was only slightly sold. 
There was a dirt road involved on the way home.
We are fans of detours that include dirt roads, especially when they include ice cream as well, which this one did.
When we got home, I had her dump her trunk down the laundry chute so I could wash everything.  My basement smelled like someone had been bathing in a pond for 3 weeks and then left all her towels out in a rainstorm.  Which pretty much was her story.
While I was switching out the loads from the washer to the dryer Saturday night, I happened to glance over and see something wriggling in a spider web that didn’t look like it belonged there.
Turns out, it didn’t.  It was a baby Eastern Ringneck snake. The tiniest little snake you’ve ever seen.
Edie really wanted to keep it, but Pat wasn’t sure if it was eating the tiny worms we brought him/her.  Also, when all of Edie’s pals came by to see her the one day she was home between adventures, the little bug catcher the snake was in didn’t get properly closed and we woke up to find Ringo gone.
Hopefully it’s made it’s way out of my house.  But if it eats bugs, then hopefully it will stay out of my eyesight.
As soon as I got Edie’s camp laundry done and my basement smelling like a basement again (a big improvement over pond water believe it or not), we took off for our last family adventure of the summer.
We headed down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to visit our friends the Dorbads.
19 month old Lincoln is cute as can be.  He also had a nasty cold he was more than generous with.  His poor mum came down with it while we were there and while Edie complained of a sore throat for a few days, I think I managed to zinc her up enough to head it off. 
I had totally forgotten that when you have a 19 month old, that’s pretty much all you do all day.
Although they are awfully cute and entertaining.
We had some great beach weather.  It was in the 80’s and thanks to some offshore winds, the water was ICE cold.  After sitting in the sun and ‘getting warm’ as my mother used to say, it was refreshing.
Also, how nice is it to get in the ocean in August and have goosebumps from the water temperature?

We wandered down to Jennette’s pier one day so Pat could fish. 
While he was up there on the pier, Edie girl & I sat on the beach nearby. We had a most fabulous chat over a coke (her) and a beer (me). 
Daddy got to fish, Edie got chocolate ice cream AND a coke and I got to sit on the beach and read not quite an entire book all day, which we all considered perfect. How to top a day like that?

By heading even farther south to Cape Hatteras National Seashore the next day.
That was the view to the left of us down the beach. 
How sweet is that?  I adore Hattaras island and that particular stretch of coastline for just that reason.
The umbrella in the distance marked the set up of a young couple near us for the day.  It was so deserted she chose to sunbathe topless.  (One of us was horrified, one of us was amused and one of us thought good for her because I’d surely burn in a most unpleasant way in some uncomfortable spots if I did that.)
We went for a stroll to collect shells and to get away from all the people.

I couldn’t help but notice that Sandy McSandster, my daughter’s beach alter ego, lives on.
That child has some sort of magnetic attraction to sand.  When she was smaller and would come in from the beach completely coated in sand, I chalked it up to her being a baby, a toddler, three, four, etc.  But now she’s 10.  And still leaves a heavy trail.  I’m surprised there’s any sand left on Hatteras Island, because the inside of my car is completely coated, as is my beach bag, the cooler and I have no doubt her entire suitcase. 

At one point, we let her go into the cooler for something, where she proceeded to coat everything in there with sand as well.  Seriously.  One hand in to grab and everything after was coated.  That beer is fresh from the cooler, after she was in it. You should have seen the one she handed her father.  He took it into the ocean to clean it off. 

I guess she’ll never outgrow it.
Which is okay, because I happen to know 40-somethings that have similar traits.  She’s in most excellent company.

Despite the fact that my child coated everything in sight in sand and our hosts were under the weather, it was a great trip.  The day we spent at Hatteras was one of the most perfect beach days I’ve ever had.  It was 80, barely a cloud in the sky, the water temp and the breeze just right.  And I got to spend a day with those two with no outside distractions besides my book.  (I’ve been plowing through “Game of Thrones”, having watched the entire show the first week Edie was at camp, I picked up the books and am now on the fourth one.)
We spent the week without television and internet.  That was week two for me, unplugged and for Edie, week four.  (She was completely unplugged while at camp.).  It might be habit forming. 
We came back Friday afternoon.  Saturday I taught a pickling class for Market Central.

We pickled peaches, green beans and cucumbers.
It was a good class if I do say so myself.
I had planned on using the Ball Pickling Mix that is all over the market this season for dill pickles.  However, due to a small oversight, there was no pickle mix on hand for the class.  A quick flip through the stack of canning & pickling cookbooks I had brought along and we selected a new one – from my trusty Food in Jars Cookbook.  We just so happened to have everything it called for on hand and so we went with it.
I’ll let you know how they turned out in a week or so when I open the jar I carried home.  I’ve yet to make anything out of that cookbook or from her websites that isn’t good, so I felt safe trying that out in a class, untested.
I do need to brag that I completely guesstimated on the amount of brine to make for those pickles and turns out my guesstimate was just enough.  Not only did I pull it out, I pulled it out perfectly.
I’m good like that.
I can’t say the same for the amount of peach brine I made, there were several quart jars left over that students took home with them.  No one seemed to be too upset about that, as the pickled peaches were a huge hit just on the smell alone and as I pointed out, when you have leftover brine, you can use it to do another batch.  I shared the recipe I came up with as a happy discovery to much rave reviews, which felt pretty darn tooting good as well.
So now we are home for a good while – school starts Wednesday and we need to settle back into that routine.  The weather today – grey, drizzly and cool – was slightly conducive towards that end.  I cleaned out the fridge and found a forgotten jar of bread & butter brine, but I also happened to have a few cukes on hand and some jalapenos from the garden that I threw in, so there was a batch of pickles made today while I was baking bread with the sourdough starter Leni shared with me.  None of us have unpacked from the beach yet – heck, Edie still has bags sitting around with camp gear all over the house, thanks to the fact that she’s slept in her own bed exactly 2 nights since we picked her up over a week ago.  It’s good to have her home, it’s good to be home and it’s good to have a few more days to collect ourselves before it all starts back up again.

I can pickle that.

2 Comments

Pat & I have been told more than a few times that we may resemble more than few sketches in Portlandia.  Admittedly, we are music snob geeks with some pretty firm standards about what music our child listens to (Mike & The Mechanics ARE a gateway band that we refuse to let her listen to and yes, we do know who Neu! is. ).  We may have watched entire series of TV shows in marathon format, but what has really gotten us the most comparison to the show is my love of pickling.

Admittedly, I have mostly laughed it off.  After all, I’ve already taught one canning & pickling class and I’m gearing up to teach  a pickling class in a few weeks, so I need to practice and know my stuff, yes? 

However, the other night, Pat & I were having dinner with friends and had jimica for the first time.  About two bites into it, I looked at him and said “This would make a great pickle”.

This week, with Edie being gone, most of the block on vacation and Pat at work all day, I’ve kept myself busy with you guessed it, pickling.  As I type this, my second batch today is on the stove – Curried Pickled Squash & Zucchini, Betty having left me a big bag she acquired from Russell.  Leni was kind enough to share a large bag of cukes I turned into Bread & Butter pickles earlier today.  The squash pickles would be my 4th batch of pickles in 3 days.  I spent all day Thursday making Watermelon rind pickles (and realized I need to rewrite the recipe to double the liquid amounts in the brine) and last night I pickled a peck of peaches (which is really fun to say.  Pat & I walked around all night saying it. I bet you said it while reading it, didn’t you?)

I have often stated that I don’t tend to follow recipes while in the kitchen, but when it comes to canning and pickling, I don’t improvise, I am by the book.  The whole concept of acid content and knowing what works and what doesn’t is sort of beyond me.  Or so I thought.  Last night, as I was getting myself set up to pickle those peaches, I realized that the last time I made a batch, I sort of merged the recipe from “Joy of Pickling” with the one from Serious Eats In A Pickle, meaning, I wrote my own recipe.  My very first pickling recipe.   And because we’ve already eaten them and people that have had pickled peaches before have eaten them and declared them just like their grandmother made, I knew I had done it right. Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with myself and sat down while the last batch was in the canner and wrote the recipe out to use in my upcoming pickling class.

My name is Becky and I’m a pickling junkie.  I’m going to walk away from the canner for a few days and head to the water for some quality time with my all time favorite partner in crime from college.  I’m going to resist the urge to pickle anything for the next few days, although I can’t promise I won’t put a bird on it.

Bread & Butter.

2 Comments
This morning I taught my first official canning class at the Charlottesville Cooking School.  I’ve taught countless friends how to can so that part wasn’t new.  I’ve assisted with numerous classes at the school over the years, so I felt comfortable in that space, but the part where I stand up in front of complete strangers and be credible about something?  That part had me nervous.  As did the part where I make sure the class was structured so that we got everything done in the amount of time scheduled for the class. Somehow I managed to pull it off though. 
We canned tomatoes and zucchini bread & butter pickles.  The class had been advertised offering cucumber pickles, but last week as I was walking around the farmer’s market, I had a heck of a time finding pickling cucumbers.  It seems the heat this summer fried just about every farmer’s crop that I talked to, causing the lack of them at my local farmer’s market.  I know from experience that regular cucumbers don’t pickle nearly as well as the pickling variety.  They will still make a fairly decent bread and butter pickle, but you can’t rush the soaking step.  As I couldn’t find a recipe with a soaking step shorter than 3 hours, the time allotted the class was 3 hours, well, I realized I was going to have to make a substitution if I was going to send my students home with a jar of pickles that I knew was going to be good.  So, after reading up on pickles, zucchini pickles it was!

After all, I didn’t want their first pickle experience to have a sub-par result.  I’ve made dill pickles that haven’t turned out and it stinks to put a bunch of work into something that you end up throwing out.  They were all taking the class because they wanted to learn to can and I wanted to make sure they enjoyed it.

I promised my students that even though we didn’t make the cucumber pickles, I would share my recipe with them.  The recipe I use is the one my mother used, from an old Ideals Family cookbook, published in the early 1970’s, although I have seen this recipe elsewhere as well. 
Bread & Butter Cucumber Pickles
(from The Ideals Family Garden Cookbook)

1 gallon cucumbers
8 small white onions
2 green peppers, shredded
½ c. salt

Syrup
5 c. sugar
1 ½ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon ground cloves
2 Tablespoon mustard seed
1 teaspoon celery seed
5 cups cider vinegar



Wash but do not pare cucumbers. Slice crosswise in paper-thin slices. (You will be well paid for this seemingly tedious task. A slicer might be easier, but be sure the slices are paper-thin.) Slice the onions thin and cut the peppers in fine shreds. Mix the salt with the three vegetables and bury 1 quart of cracked ice in the mixture. Cover with a weighted lid and let stand for 3 hours, then drain very thoroughly.

Meanwhile, make a pickling syrup as follows: Mix the sugar, turmeric and cloves together. Add mustard and celery seeds and vinegar. Pour this syrup over the sliced pickles. Place over a low heat and paddle occasionally, using a wood spoon. Heat the mixture to scalding, but do not boil. Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal by processing for 10 minutes.
Let stand at least 4-6 weeks before cracking open.  The longer they sit, the better they get.
I don’t remember the yield on this recipe, it’s been a year or two since I made it and I don’t have it noted.  I think it makes somewhere between 7 and 9 pint jars worth. 
Happy pickling!

Pickled Peach Pie.

2 Comments

After taking exactly one bite of the pickled peaches I’d made last month, my little foodie Edie declared we needed a pie made of pickled peaches.  This weekend I accommodated that request.

That girl of mine is onto something.  Combined with ice cream (for dessert) and yogurt (for breakfast), pickled peach pie is the way to go, if you can stop yourself from eating the jar of pickled peaches.  After her first bite of pie, she informed me, we’re gonna need more of these, so I guess I’m going to head out this week and get another half bushel or so of peaches to pickle, because we have managed to eat almost half of the two batches I put up just a few weeks ago.

Pickled peaches have the consistency of canned peaches – that is, soft.  Where the pickling comes into play is the taste.  They have a bit of a tang to them from the vinegar, a bit of spice to them thanks to the ginger and cinnamon and the natural sweetness of a peach.  They are, as has been said around here, ‘dang good’.
I used the recipe from The Serious Eats website in pickling them.  The only variation I did to the recipe was to grate the ginger rather than slicing it.  As I noted in my post when I made them, I had a good bit of brine left over – enough to get at least double, if not triple what the original recipe called for. Which clearly, is a good thing.

I did a tutorial on making a pie crust a while back for our friend Bea who is living in England, but realized I didn’t include the recipe at the time (I had sent it to her previously), so to correct that, here’s my pie crust recipe.  It’s based on the recipe my mother handed down that I’ve tweaked slightly.

Pie Crust
(Yields 2 crusts for a 10″ pie pan)
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (or a mix of white & whole wheat pastry flour)
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter (or crisco or lard or a blend of shortenings), cold.
6-7 tablespoons ice cold water with a dash of vanilla.
Cut butter or shortening into flour, salt & sugar until the mixture resembles fine crumbs.  Slowly add the water, a tablespoon at a time, until the dough just holds together.  (I find whole wheat flour needs more water than white flour.)
Let the dough rest in the refrigerator while preparing the filling.  Even just a few minutes helps when you roll it out.  The colder the dough is, the easier it is to roll out.   I roll out my pie crust between two layers of wax paper.  I pull one layer off, lay my crust down in the pan (or on top of the filling) and then gently peel the second layer off. 
To make pickled peach pie, I drained two and a half pint jars, tossed them with a sprinkle of sugar and about a 1/4 cup or so of flour, similar to the recipe for a regular peach pie.  I followed the baking instructions for standard peach pie – my method is to bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350 for 35 minutes or so. 
A note about pie pans- I use only vintage Wear-Ever aluminum pans.  I have tried many different pie pans over the years and aluminium pans are the way to go.   It results in a much nicer bottom crust than any other pan and is what commercial bakeries use. 

Along the way.

3 Comments

I have lined up another canning class to teach this summer – a pickling class in August for Market Central.  In talking it over with the folks there, we thought it might be fun to do different types of pickles, maybe even some fruit pickles.  Admittedly, I have wanted to try pickling some fruit.  If you have been reading this blog for some time, you might have noticed I tend to pickle pretty much everything in sight.  I am utterly fascinated by the process of pickling and I happen to have a husband who likes pickles, so it’s kinda win-win. I thought it would be best if I actually pickled some fruit before I marched into a class and taught it, so that you know, I might appear as if I know what I’m doing. 

So I called up my friend Melissa and borrowed her copy of “The Joy of Pickling” yet again, with an invitation to come help me figure out how to pickle peaches.

Melissa came over and held my hand on the watermelon rind pickles the first time I did them – I like having her come over and help me when I’m doing something new in the canning realm.  I’m so glad I had her over for the peach pickles, she definitely helped me get myself organized, get down to business and get the job done.   She made sure we followed the recipe exactly, even measuring out the peaches to the weight called for in the recipe.  She also tried to ensure we used the proper equipment, another thing I tend to overlook.

I have learned the hard way that when pickling, you really need to use ‘nonreactive’ pots.  Which means stainless steel. I might have a few hard anodized pots that are slightly scarred from pickling & jamming adventures.  I didn’t think I had any stainless steel pots left until I remembered a huge stock pot that seems to have found it’s way into the sandbox.  It didn’t start out as a sandbox toy, I think it was a piece of camping equipment that was stored in the basement and since the gang of girls that hang out around my house think that pretty much anything in basement is up for grabs, it somehow found it’s way into the sandbox.

I needed an extra large bowl, my big orange plastic one having gone missing (I seem to recall it being borrowed by a certain wee one that lives here for some sort of project.  I’ll have to check the tiki hut to see if it’s there as it’s not in the sandbox.  She’s lately started dragging things down into Brian & Betty’s yards, building forts there too.  It really could be anywhere on the block now that I think about it.  Hmm….)Thankfully, I was able to grab a punchbowl to use as a spare large bowl.  It’s good for your various collections to do double duty I think, and as they are large and glass, they are excellent for pickling.  I keep those out of reach of little hands, which is why they haven’t been moved into another location.

I also realized I have no empty half pint jelly jars on hand.  I have no idea what that’s about. I swore I had a case or two down there.  Thankfully, I did have a few empty cases of pint jars, so we used those.

This morning I felt the call of the thrifts, thinking I might find myself a new stainless steel pot.  The one I rescued from the sandbox holds about 20 gallons or so (okay, not really, but it’s the biggest pot in the house) and honestly, I have nowhere to store it upstairs, which is how it ended up in the basement and then the sandbox. So off I went.

I totally scored today.  I found a new springform pan to replace mine, which has a dent in the bottom thanks to one of the neighborhood kids and their hijinks (it sounds as if my kitchen is regularly raided as a toy box, but really, it’s not.  The springform pan has been like that for a few years now.  I’m slow to replace things, can you tell?) as well as a preforated baguette pan and a Julia Child cookbook, Julia Child & Company, which was apparently the companion book to her show in the late 70’s.   Good scores, all of them.    But those were not my best scores. 

My best scores were a pair of Land’s End pink suede boots and a pair of red cowgirl boots, with room to grow for a certain girl’s foot.  Her face when she saw them was priceless.  She has always refused to wear anything matching with me, but red cowgirl boots?  Watch out world, we’re gonna have matching boots. 
There were also punch bowls galore at every thrift I went to today.  It was hard to resist them, but I did.  I think three is enough, don’t you?  I never did find a new stainless steel pot.  The one I have works for now, it’s just, huge. 
Oh, and the peach pickles?  7 pounds of peaches yielded exactly 4 pint jars.  Not a whole lot.  I got some half pint jars today and did another batch, as there was a bunch of brine left over and I didn’t want to waste it.  They have to sit for at least 24 hours and I don’t feel like opening one of my 4 large jars tonight, so I can’t report on the taste.  Two batches of pickles didn’t make a dent in the half bushel of seconds I picked up out at Henley’s for a song yesterday, so I also canned a half dozen pint jars of plain peaches and whipped up a pie this afternoon, because yesterday’s slightly underripe peaches were today’s about to be overripe peaches when they sit in a box in your un-air conditioned kitchen and it’s 90 something degrees outside.  Also exactly why I felt I needed to can AND run the oven today because honestly, the house didn’t feel like it was 90 something out there today.   I can report my pie crust definitely acted as if it was too hot to be making a pie, but I perservered anyway and made it work.  It’s not pretty, but it’s pie.

Now’s your chance.

1 Comment

Want to learn to can?  Well, here’s your chance!  I’m teaching a Canning Class at the Charlottesville Cooking School on Saturday, July 28.  We’ll do tomatoes and peaches and talk about all sorts of food preservation. I’ve got some great recipes and tricks to share that I’ve picked up in the dozen years I’ve been canning on my own.   I’ve been working on my outline for this class since last winter, so I guess you could say I’m pretty excited about it.  I’ve been teaching friends how to can for years in my kitchen, so the opportunity to do it in a space bigger than my 4 square feet of counter space that has air conditioning is going to be a treat!  Sign up today!

Bacon Jam and Other Good Food Highlights from Yesterday.

2 Comments
It’s December.  While I suppose I could be decorating the house (which somehow in my mind involves cleaning it as well and I’d rather avoid that as much as possible), or crafting fabulous gifts (leaving that for my knitting circle tonight) or shopping for gifts (which means leaving the house and dealing with the madness out there right now), yesterday I decided to curl up in my kitchen and try a few recipes that have piqued my interest lately.
The first one was a Cranberry Spread I’d seen here.  We are big fans of cranberries, with any and every presentation of cranberry being good with us.  The recipe looked easy – 2 bags of cranberries, a bottle of maple syrup and lemon extract. When finished, I yielded about seven 4 oz. jelly jars, that I canned in a hot water bath.   I may have to make another batch or two before fresh cranberries disappear from the produce aisle.  As a side note, I spread some on a slice of this triple fudge banana bread for breakfast this morning and they paired beautifully. I highly recommend making both.  (Chocolate and cranberries are oh, so good together. And as there was lots of fruit as well as whole wheat flour involved, I’m declaring it a healthy breakfast.)
Up next, was Bacon Jam. I am a big fan of bacon.  It makes everything better.  I can’t handle eating a large amount of meat well, but somehow there is an exception for bacon. I’ve been known to eat an entire pound at a time, straight out of the frying pan.  I love bacon.  I’m one of those cooks who saves every bit of my bacon fat and then uses it in place of (or in addition to) butter or olive oil when I start a pot of soup, or to fry things like green tomatoes and tofu. (More on this in a minute.)  So, as I started seeing bacon jam pop up on many of my favorite foodie sites and even crafty sites on the web, I was intrigued.  In my usual fashion, I read a number of recipes and blogposts about it until I felt I had a good handle on a recipe.  Ultimately, I went with this one, because it involved a slow cooker.  Over the years, anything with the word ‘jam’ or ‘jelly’ in it has tended to not quite work out for me.  I’ve scarred some pans, not to mention my ego and quite possibly my family, in making jams that never quite set or that were just completely inedible.  It wasn’t until I read that you can make fruit butters in a slowcooker that I was successful in anything but straight preserving and pickling. (I’ve made apple & peach and am now convinced I can butter anything.)
So, bacon jam.
Good bacon is key, so I called up my friends at Open Gate Farm.  They have a fresh rosemary and Virginia maple syrup cured bacon they smoke themselves that is just beyond words.  Cville peeps, if you like bacon, then you need to get yourself some of this. Tell them I sent you.
 
They sell it in slabs, so you can cut it to the thickness you like. 
I realized I had forgotten to pull my bacon out of the freezer to let it defrost, but I was pleased to discover you can slice it frozen with a serrated knife quite beautifully.
I prefer to cook my bacon on cookie sheets in the oven – you can do a pound or two at one time, without getting grease all over your stovetop and surrounding area.  I love this method.
Slicing the bacon was probably the most difficult part of this whole endeavor.  Once the bacon is cooked, you saute some onions and garlic in the leftover fat, add cider vinegar, dark brown sugar, and coffee.  Don’t question the ingredients, just hold out for the finished sum of their parts.  Dump it in the slow cooker for a few hours until it’s thick.  If you love the smell of bacon, then you will be in heaven for the next few hours. When the liquid is thickened, throw the whole thing in the food processor (Or in my case, the blender) and coarsely chop it.  Voila.
A sweet yet savory, bacony spread for biscuits or whatever you can dream up.  I packed this in 4 oz jelly jars as well, once again, yielding about seven of them.  As it is recommended that any meat product be pressure canned and I am lacking a pressure canner,  I instead chose to freeze the jars so that they will keep for a longer period.  I cannot stress enough how much good bacon is a key ingredient in this. 
I wasn’t done with my good food day yet. We had some leftover oysters from our weekend that I fried up and turned into po-boys for dinner last night.  Edie is not a fan of the oyster and requested my fried tofu version, that is based on a recipe from  Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes.    Normally I fry the tofu in bacon fat (I told you it would come back up!), for an extra rich flavor.  I cube and then bread the tofu as you would anything else you would fry.  Unbeknownst to her, I tossed her tofu in the oyster liquid to moisten it, to help the breading stick.  She liked it so much, she asked if there was any leftovers for her lunch today. (She will like oysters, she will!)
I usually make my own tartar sauce and while I am still experimenting with my recipe, yesterday I added some plain yogurt to the mix, with excellent results. It gave a certain tang to the mix that complimented the oysters beautifully. Here’s a list of what I threw in there:
fresh parsley
sprinkle of dill
small amount of finely chopped onion
a few finely chopped dill pickles
salt
pepper
celery powder
lemon zest
lemon juice
mayo
plain, lowfat yogurt
Stir & refrigerate.  The more it sits, the more the flavors will combine. I somehow never am able to make enough for it to keep on hand for more than a day or two. I’ve heard it keeps for up to a week (or more). 
All in all, it was a good food day around here.  Lots of experimenting, lots of happy results.

SWAP!!!

Leave a comment

If you know me at all, you know I have a tendency to can or freeze everything in sight.  You know I’m pretty devoted to knowing where our food comes from. When I first heard about these food swaps going on around the country, I thought, oh cool.  Someone should organize one here, because I’d like to check one out.   And then my friend Vikki emailed me and said WE should it. 

That does make sense.  I mean, I do have a tendency do that sort of thing too.  Like start a knitting group, a girl scout troop for my daughter and her friends, the list could go on….. 

So, we got together and brainstormed where to have this thing.  I talked to a few folks and found a space for us to use, The Garage, and we came up with a name, Cville Swaps.  We have a Facebook Page and I’ve created a page on this blog for it.  (See it up there across the top?  I’m pretty impressed with myself for figuring that out.).  We plan on holding our first event on Sunday, November 13, from 2-4 pm.  Everyone is invited, so if you are in the area and interested, please let us know!

All manner of items that you make, grow and forage for are acceptable to swap.  The lists I’ve read around the web are pretty cool.  I might borrow Edie’s body scrub recipe and make some of that to swap.  I’m also thinking some of my watermelon rind pickles would be a good swap.  I’ve thought about bringing some Amish Friendship Bread starter too.  Ever since I found out I could freeze it and always have it on hand and seen all those recipes on their website, I’ve been a happy girl.  I’ve made the orange cranberry muffins, the triple chocolate muffins, the double chocolate muffins, and the pumpkin spice ones.  Mmm.  Oh, sorry.  I’ve wandered off topic….

So, Sunday, November 13.  See you there?

Update – I created a blog just for the swap.  I’ll have some things about it on here as well, but look on the Cville Swaps blog for more updates.

Something new.

1 Comment
Finding myself with a glut of fresh veggies, most of which are not very pretty thanks to all the rain around here lately, and having found myself down to my last canning jars, I decided it was time to try something new.

Given the fact that two bathing suits have been hanging out to dry for over a week quite unsuccessfully, thanks to what seems to be a daily downpour here, not to mention the fondness our squirrels have shown towards tomatoes, I decided to forgo the idea of drying tomatoes out in the sun and went for the oven method instead.

While I had the oven on, I threw in some Thai Cayenne peppers a friend gave me and dried them out as well.  I read you can hang them up and they’ll dry out in your kitchen over time, but the oven was on, and well, I’m not a patient person. 

It took most of the afternoon and evening yesterday, with the oven on at the lowest temperature (still quicker than any other method). I dried out a cookie sheet worth of cherry and roma tomatoes,  as well as a decent amount of peppers.  The smell was amazing and when I tasted the tomatoes, they were like candy.   Yum.  Much better than any other dried tomato I’ve ever had.  Why have I not tried this before?

What’s shaking around here.

Leave a comment
As if Betty’s departure and the beginning of school wasn’t enough to shake things up, Mother Nature has really thrown us for a few loops around here this week.  The little earthquake over in Mineral apparently had quite an impact all over the place.  We’ve felt a few of them before, but were absolutely shocked that it was felt so far away this time!  I think the 4.5 aftershock at 1 a.m. the next night threw us for more of a loop than the ‘big’ one, especially with the weather report as we were heading to bed predicting widespread destruction from Hurricane Irene. (or maybe because I was at the pool with a gaggle of girls for the first one and sound asleep in my bed for the big aftershock, which is infinitely more jarring in my opinion).   Thankfully for us, she stayed east, and we got to stay on the western most fringe, which meant a rainy, breezy day that felt like it should have been a college football Saturday.  One more week….
Meanwhile, school started, soccer practice started, I attended my first PTO board member meeting, I vaguely started planning the year for our Girl Scout troop AND, inspiration has happened on my plan to not really go back to work for someone else!!!  Turns out reality has thus far been quite kind. (See, I knew if I ignored it, it would be fine. It always is.) Although, I am sort of not too pleased that I am suddenly back to waking up every morning at 5:30 again.  I suppose it will make it easier to get back into that early morning gym routine that I swear I’m going to get back into one of these days…
And that’s not all that we’ve been up to.
We dog sat our favorite old, brown dog this week, who handled the earthquakes much better than the hurricane.  (Although he certainly dilly dallied on our walk in the middle of the storm on Saturday, which bothered a certain someone to no end.)

I braved the muggy, windy, rainy morning to haul my rear to market early Saturday morning and picked up this case of scratch and dent tomatoes for $10 and spent my Saturday canning ‘maters.  I got 18 pints out of it, bringing my stash to 3 full cases for the upcoming winter season.  Not too shabby.
I also whipped up a wicked roasted salsa the other night and then canned the leftovers (after adding vinegar to maintain the acidity).  I’ll open a jar this week to see how it fares. 
Saturday night, we had friends over to try this out for dinner.  We let the kids roll their own and they loved it.  I added some marinated tofu to the mix, which just hit the spot.  In this cookbook there is an eggplant teriyaki recipe that has a quick and easy sauce that is my go to.  Basically, it’s equal parts sesame oil, OJ, and tamari, with some garlic.  Boiling your tofu beforehand makes it firmer, and I’ve heard that it also makes it more amicable to soaking up a marinade.  I use Twin Oaks tofu, which is local and infinitely better than any other tofu I’ve found in any grocery store.  It’s one of those things that’s always in my fridge.
And last, but certainly not least, the squirrels finally decided to back off the garden and I picked a whole bowl of tomatoes!  Okay, so it’s a candy dish and it’s grape tomatoes.  Still, on principle, I’m pretty darn tooting happy about them.  I broke out the china for them!