Sunday, November 09, 2008

Home Canning Season 2008

The frenzy of food preservation hit us just as hard this summer as last year. In 2007 we had attempted to put away as much food for the winter as we could, partly due to our desire to avoid India-grown pickles and California-grown tomatoes throughout the winter as much as we could, and partly just to learn how to do it.

Some things disappeared really quickly - I think we had eaten most of our 20 jars of tomatoes by January. The chow, relish and pickles were gone by mid-winter too. When spring finally arrived, all we had left was some pickled cauliflower, ikra and salsa.
This year I tried to focus a little more on the stuff that went early last year, and a couple of new things like the sauerkraut mentioned in an early post.

I decided not to can tomatoes or tomato sauce this year. Because tomatoes aren't that acidic, you have to process them forever in a boiling water canner to safely can them. All that extra cooking didn't do too much for the flavour, either. This summer, whenever I had a few ripe tomatoes from our garden, I tossed them into the freezer whole. I also froze a big batch of tomato sauce in plastic yogurt containers and I also processed about 25 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes by roasting them in the oven until their skins blackened. I saved the run-off tomato juice to drink, and froze the roasted tomatoes in big blocks.
I also froze most of the swiss chard, kale and spinach that we got from the CSA so I could use them in soups and stews all winter long.


I went a little crazy with the pickles this year. I pickled everything - carrots, garlic scapes, green beans, zucchini and the odd cucumber. Between my garden, our CSA deliveries, and the farmer's market, there were a lot of vegetables to process as soon as they came in the house.

One day stands out in my memory in particular. I woke up early to cut up cucumbers and zucchini so they could sit in salt during the day when I was at work (the salt draws out the moisture from the cut vegetables and keeps them crunchier once they're pickled). My plan was to spend the evening canning the pickles and then making venison meatloaf for a friend at work and then doing laundry for my trip to Quebec.
At work that day, I received some free Bomber tickets for a game that very evening. I'm not the biggest football fan, but Jeff loves going to the games, (especially when they're free) so I accepted them, thinking that Jeff could find a buddy to take to the game and I could continue my evening pickling plans. So when I got home, I started boiling the water in the canner, and Jeff started calling his friends. By the time I was into mixing up the venison meatloaf however, he conceded defeat at finding anybody to go with him to the game. The onus was on me to accompany him to the damn football game. At this point, kickoff was about an hour and 15 minutes away. No problem, right?

At about this time I checked my e-mail. There was a new message from the Landless Farmers (our CSA) saying that there were FREE EXTRA CUCUMBERS available for pick-up a couple of blocks away on a first come, first serve basis. My mind raced... If I could get Jeff to run over and pick up a couple more pounds of cukes, I could get the meatloaf in the oven in the meantime, and then when I got the cucumbers from Jeff, I'd cut them into slices and get them soaking in salt by the time the meatloaf was ready to come out of the oven in time to go to the football game, and then I could can them when we came home from the game! I could make it all work! We might miss the beginning of the game, but it would all work out!


For some reason Jeff agreed to this plan and he ran off to fetch the free cukes. He must really love me. Or maybe he just loves pickles. I don't know.


To make everything more stupid, I decided that I didn't want to make sweet bread and butter pickles from this new batch of cucumbers - I wanted sour dill pickle rounds even though I had no dill. Wasn't it convenient that there was a Safeway directly on our way to the football stadium? It was a strange feeling to walk into the game with huge fronds of dill erupting from my purse - I got my share of heckling for my dill from the drunken football fans, but I felt quite vindicated when the Bombers actually won the game, the first win of the season.


I totally chalk that up to the dill. Anyway, the Bombers won, the second batch of pickles were successfully processed and EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.


I didn't do a proper count of everything we canned this year, but this picture shows what my pantry looks like right now. Lots of relish, chow, sauerkraut and salsa and LOTS of pickles.

Sauerkraut

- Sorry for the lack of Planet Borscht posts this fall - since I got a new modem I've been having problems uploading images to Blogger - hopefully it'll all get solved soon!

Remember when you were a little kid - your mom always let you pick your favourite food to eat on your birthday? I always picked sauerkraut. Sauerkraut with farmer sausage and potatoes. Mmmmm. Still one of my all-time favourites. It was one of the first meals I cooked for Jeff when we were first dating - I don't know how the relationship would have worked out if he hadn't liked it too... Thank goodness I never had to find out.

Since sauerkraut has always been one of my favourite foods, it's surprising that I never thought of making it before this summer, when it was one of the most plentiful veggies in our weekly CSA box. During the first few weeks of cabbage deliveries we tried to eat a lot of cabbage borscht and coleslaw, but every week we'd get another one and they'd start piling up. I went searching for cabbage recipes... what would use up a maximum amount of cabbage with a minimal amount of effort?

I found my obvious answer quite quickly - my two favourite Menno cookbooks, More with Less and Simply in Season - both had a really simple Sauerkraut recipe designed for small batches like mine. I kind of combined the two recipes - the MWL version has a bit more detail but I think it assumes that you're going to start out with really fresh cabbage that will make its own brine, and the SIS version tells you to add water.

So here's how I made my sauerkraut:

1. Chop cabbage. It would be sensible to have a food processor for this purpose, but yet again I did all the chopping by hand. My shoulder got quite sore and so my darling husband got to chop his share of cabbage as well. Darling husband.

2. Add a bit of salt to the shredded cabbage and pack it really tightly into clean jars. (I ended up taking the cabbage from these five jars and cramming it into three). Liquid should cover the cabbage once it's in the jar - if you're using super fresh cabbage, I think the salt would pull enough water out of the cabbage to not require any more water. However, my cabbages had been sitting in my fridge for a week or two already so I topped up the levels with boiling water.
3. Put really loose lids on the jars and let it sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. During the first week the liquid will ooze out of the jar as it's fermenting. Once the water levels drop down again, your kraut is done. Then you can move it into sterilized jars and can it for longer storage.
That's it, that's all. Easy Peasy.
It worked so well and so easily that I decided to make a second batch. Although this time I was in a hurry or something and I neglected to top up the water levels when I first put the cabbage in the jars. I remembered to do it about a week later but it didn't work out so well.

These jars of kraut didn't do their oozing thing and when I took off the lids after two weeks, this is what it looked like.

Some of the really old crock-cured recipes I found when I was first doing my research said that mold was possible and could simply be removed along with the top inch or two of cabbage. (Assuming you were using a gallon size stone crock filled with massive amounts of cabbage). This was NOT the case for my small jars of kraut - the whole thing smelled yucky and therefore it was discarded.

Ah, you live, you learn. The first batch still gave me some damn fine kraut and I'll definitely be doing this again.