Every Clink

Remember this post when I said to ask me how I feel about our tomato jungle in a few weeks?  Well, it has been a few weeks and I am up to my eyeballs in tomatoes.  Everyday, beautiful red globes shine from the garden.  Red globes that I swear were green the day before.  I find myself thinking...how did I miss this one yesterday?  Navigating the tomato jungle is now a daily adventure.  The ripe fruit is them piled on my kitchen window sills and in my fruit basket waiting to be turned into fresh tomato sauce, canned for later use or eaten freshly sliced with homemade mozzeralla and home-grown basil.  Ah...summer is grand.

 Tomatoes have not been the only produce gracing my counter-tops.  I have also been canning beans and pickles from the garden.  Our bean plants have slowed down at the moment but they are covered in a new crop of flowers.  Our bees are busy pollinating and we expect another bumper crop of beans in about a week.  Last week you would have found me processing fresh picked blueberries making them into no-sugar added jam and freezing the rest.  Farmer's Market peaches were turned into Jalapeno Peach Chutney today! 

 I think my summers can be defined by my canning calendar.  Ebbs and flows of ripening food determine what days I am free to manage my own time and which days I am chained to the metal beast that is my pressure canner.  Don't get me wrong, canning is wonderful, just often time consuming and a little tedious.  Oh and there is nothing like steaming up your kitchen on a 100 degree day!  

 Thermometer in the shade!

I love to preserve food.  The self-sufficient nature of the whole process, the sense of pride in producing a beautiful jar of food, nothing can take the place of those feelings.  There is something very satisfying when you hear the "clink" of a mason jar sealing as it cools.  A sound that I know generations of homemakers have relished for many summers before now.  Every clink fast-forwards me to this winter when I will open a jar of tomatoes, as red and tasty as the day they were put in that jar.  Every clink is another homemade gift for Christmas and birthdays.  Every clink reminds me of why I am here...making my career as a homemaker, providing for my family and preserving a way of life that will never go out of style.  

 Beans and the some of the tomato sauce I canned yesterday (aren't they pretty!)

I canned this hot sauce hubby made from our hot peppers!

And..one very hot dog chilling in the A/C...not sure why he is lying in this position...I promise his neck is not broken.  Sometimes I think he is just trying to make himself look miserable...as if I would feel sorry for this spoiled pup!

Green beans, a broody hen and table of pears...

Now I know what you are thinking, based on the title of this posting, you think I am about to tell you a hilarious joke, you know the kind...a green bean and a broody hen walked into a bar....or a riddle...if you have green beans, a broody hen, and a table of pears how do you get them all across the river?  But alas, this title reflects my busy life the last few weeks.

I thought September-October would be when things would start to slow down, the winter garden is planted, the chickens are healthy and laying eggs, and the summer canning season is coming to an end.  But I was wrong....

Lately I have been up to my elbows in landscaping.  Here at our home and also at my folks house and a friend's new goat dairy.  I have been tutoring my nephew, I start a new part time job this coming Wed, and I have recently started babysitting for a set of 2 year old twins, one of which has Type I diabetes.  I am also in the beginning stages of starting a blog for a local school garden I volunteer with!  Whew and I thought I was busy with all of my normal chores....

Speaking of normal chores.  I thought I was done canning, at least until the apples were in full season.  But I was wrong, we are STILL getting green beans.  Yes folks, central NC, October, still getting basket fulls of pole beans.  We planted these pole bean plants in the early spring along with our bush beans.  All summer the plants grew up the fence and never once produced a flower.  Along comes late August and the plants decide they are finally ready to make some beans.  We have picked beans 2-3 times a week since and there are still blooms and tons of beans on the vines as we speak!  I have even had enough to can a few quarts at a time...speaking of...I have at least 2 quarts waiting to be canned in the fridge.

We also have a Buff Orpington that went broody a few weeks ago.  For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it basically means she is sitting on the eggs being a good mom waiting for them to hatch.  This would be great if the eggs were fertilized, but they are not.  So this poor little hen is mustering all of her strength to sit on eggs that wont hatch, sometimes she even sits on nothing.  Poor confused hen.

She wont come out of the nest box, she wont eat, and she wont drink.  This is not a good scenario for our little hen.  So the poor little girl is confined to a wire cage at the moment.  It sounds cruel but allowing her to stay broody and die of starvation is even worse.  The wire bottom in the cage allows air flow under her belly, which in a hen's little brain is not a good situation when you are trying to keep eggs warm.  Since she can't nest she should snap her out of the broody mind-set and go back to being a happy egg-layer.

We are seeing some progress with her.  She is eating and drinking regularly and she has stopped making the broody "cooing" and "clucking" noises and has progressed to squawking and "bock-bocking" (yes I just attempted to spell the sound a chicken makes!). We expect her to lay an egg soon and then she will be released from her brood-breaking prison.

Ah yes, the table of pears.  Our dining room table is covered completely in pears thanks to a dear friend.  So it looks like I will be doing some serious canning in the next week or so!

So I apologize for not being here to update you all on my craziness and sorry for the massively long post!  So for your enjoyment, here are some pictures of me and my nephews and our recent visit to a friend's goat dairy, Prodigal Farm

 This horse didn't want his picture taken!

Holy Hot Peppers!

Our hot pepper plants are in full swing!  This year we planted Jalapenos, Carribean Red Habeneros, Thai Chilis, Ancho Chilis, and Cayenne Peppers.  For those of you who are not familiar with hot pepper varieties, here is a brief hotness rating.....

Ancho Chili: Mild and flavorful
Jalapenos:  Medium
Cayenne:  Hot, eye's watering, pass me the milk kind of hot, but very tolerable when cooked into spicy dishes
Thai Chili: A little hotter than the cayenne
Habeneros:  Imagine eating a ball of fire.

Hubby likes it hot so we decided to plant enough peppers to melt the sun.  This year we started our peppers in January, from seeds under our indoor grow light.  Most hot peppers have a "days till maturity" range between 60-90 days.  So starting them early gives those feisty little fruits a head start....meaning we get hot peppers in the hottest part of the summer and will continue to harvest into September and possibly October.  The habeneros alone take up to 90 days for the fruit to ripen.  Our habenero plant is covered in fruits and one is just now starting on the path the fiery red.    We are getting handfuls of peppers every day and so hence begins the preservation process!

We have been drying the Cayenne and Thai chilis in the oven at 150 degrees.  This usually takes about 12 hours.  We then store them in jars and they last us about a year.  I imagine they keep for longer but we usually use up our batch in a year's time.

I also made a batch of Pickled Jalapenos from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving.  They look beautiful...still waiting for them to sit a while before tasting them!  It's such an easy recipe....

Pickled Jalapenos
 
Ingredients

1 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
4 tsp liquid honey
2 tsp pickling spice
1/2 tsp pickling salt
2 cloves garlic, halved
1/2 lb jalapeno peppers, thinly sliced

Directions

1.  Prepare canner, lids and jars.  You will need two 8oz jars for this recipe.
2.  Thinly slice the jalapenos.  I left the seeds in, you can remove the seeds if you prefer a milder finished product. 

*Be sure to wash your hands thoroughly after handling the peppers, before touching your eyes or mouth!*

 
2.  Combine the vinegar, water, honey, pickling spice and salt in a small saucepan.  Bring to a boil over high heat, remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes.

3.  Place 1/2 clove of garlic in each hot jar.  Divide the peppers evenly between the two jars.  Add another 1/2 clove of garlic.

4.  Return pickling liquid to a boil and then pour over pickles to within 1/2 inch of the rim.  Place hot lids and bands on jars.  Process at 10 minutes according to the directions for your boiling water canner.

Enjoy!

Are you ready for some more jam?

So...here is the next installment of jams that I have experimented with.  Spiced Blueberry Honey Jam...the name says it all...if there were a smell button on this blog, you would know that this is a fragrant jam that has delicate yet complex flavors that make it very unique! 

Spiced Blueberry Honey Jam
from the Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups fresh or frozen coarsely chopped bluenerries
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup liquid honey*
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 pouch liquid fruit pectin

* Use local honey if available to support your local beekeepers (and add the flavors of your local flora).  If you don't have access to local honey, be sure to use organic or high quality honey that is not cut with corn syrup.

Directions:

1. Place blueberries, sugar, honey, lemon juice and nutmeg in a large stainless steel saucepan.

2. Bring to a full boil over high heat and boil hard for 2 minutes, stirring constantly.

3. Remove from heat and stir in pectin.

4. Ladle into hot jars and process for 10 minutes in your boiling water canner...follow directions for your canner for processing jams.

Enjoy!  This recipe yielded four 8oz jelly jars.  

Sugar Free Blueberry and Peach Jams

So continues my quest for jam perfection!  Along with the large amount of blueberries I purchased a few days ago, I also made a trip to the Farmer's Market and bought some beautiful peaches.  I decided to experiment with my bounty and made some beautiful and tasty sugar free jams!

First off, being diabetic, I am always looking for an alternative to sugar.  I have found what I consider the golden child of sugar substitutes!  Xylitol is an all natural sweetener derived from fruits and vegetables.  It has little to no effect on my blood sugar and it substitutes 1 to 1 for sugar in most recipes.  I love it because it has no weird aftertaste and it is all-natural.  I order my xylitol online.

Although xylitol works as a great sugar substitute, I was not sure how it would work in jam.  When making jam, you usually add pectin....of course you can cook down the jam without pectin, but this takes much longer and I just don't have that kind of patience!  Store bought pectin has added sugar to help with the gelling and the preservation of the jam.  This creates a dilemma when using a sugar substitute.  I have read that it is possible to make jam using pectin and sugar substitutes but most recipes recommend doing this as a freezer jam.  I was interested in doing canned jam so I did a little research on making sugar-free jam and found this wonderful product...

 

Pomona's Universal Pectin is wonderful!  Use it for making low-sugar, no sugar added, and sugar free (using sugar substitute) jam.  You can use any kind of sugar substitute including splenda, stevia, xylitol, and honey.  The pectin is easy to use and just has one extra step that is different from other store bought pectin.  I purchased this at our local natural foods store, but I think you can order it online as well!

So...here is the recipe I used for my sugar free jam.  I halved the suggested recipe in the Pomona's insert and made half batches of each blueberry and peach.  The recipe listed below is for the half batch.

Sugar-Free Jam (using xylitol)

Before you start jamming, prepare the Pomona's Pectin Calcium Water following the directions in the box insert.  The calcium water is shown in the picture above, it keeps for months in the fridge and you only use a small amount per recipe, so you will only need to do this step once. 

Ingredients

2 cups mashed berries or peaches 

2 tbls lemon juice

3/4 cup xylitol (use less or more depending on your taste)

1 teaspoon Calcium water (for blueberry jam) or 2 teaspoons calcium water (for peach jam)

1 teaspoon Pectin powder (for blueberry jam) or 1.5 teaspoons Pectin powder (for peach jam)

Directions

1.  Prepare canner and jars.

2. Measure fruit and place in a large stainless steel pot, add lemon juice.

3. Add calcium water and stir well.

 

 

4. Measure xylitol in a separate bowl and add pectin powder, mix well.

5. Bring fruit mixture to a boil.

6. Add xylitol/pectin powder to fruit mixture and stir vigorously until pectin is dissolved.  

7. Return to a boil and boil rapidly for 1 minute.  Remove from heat.

8. Fill hot jars with 1/4" headspace, seal with lids and boil in boiling water canner for 10 minutes.  Follow your canner recommendations for processing jams.

 

I filled 4 oz jars, since I don't eat a ton of jam, these sizes work better for me (and they make the cutest gifts!).  I yielded three 4 oz jars of peach with a little left over and four 4oz jars of blueberry with a little left over.  They taste amazing!  I am pretty darn proud of myself being that this is the very first time I have experimented with sugar free jams!

We're jammin, jammin...

I haven't posted in several days because I have been elbows deep in produce and spending lots of time with my canner.  My poor hubby is beginning to think he has been replaced by the steamy, hot dates I have had with my Presto.  In the last few days I have canned beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and thanks to the season's bounty at the farmer's market and some beautiful blueberries (on sale!) at the local natural foods grocery, I have have begun experimenting with jams and conserves. 

So over the next few posts I figure I will update ya'll on what jam/conserve recipes I've been experimenting with!  Starting with....


Maple Blueberry Conserve with Walnuts from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving
 (this book is great for someone who is new to canning, or for someone who routinely gets small batches of produce!)  The recipe below is for a single batch.  I doubled the recipe and got about four 8oz jelly jars out of the recipe.

Ingredients

  *Make sure you get all of your ingredients together before you start working.

2 cups fresh (or frozen) blueberries
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup raisins (I left these out)
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 tsp each: ground allspice and ginger

Combine blueberries, water, maple syrup, and lemon juice in a medium stainless steel saucepan.  Bring to a boil over high heat, cover, reduce heat and boil gently for 5 minutes or until fruit is tender, stirring occasionally.

Stir in sugar and raisins.  Return to boil, reduce heat and boil gently, uncovered, until mixture will form a light gel, about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.  I heated it to 220 degrees F.

Remove from heat and stir in walnuts, allspice and ginger.

Ladle into hot jars and process for 10 minutes in a boiling water canner (follow your canner's instructions for canning jams and conserves) 

Makes about 1 1/2 cups if using the recipe above.


I tasted the conserve before canning it and it tasted so yummy!  This particular recipe has a little too much sugar for me, but hubby will love it and I think it will make great gifts!  We have not broken open a jar yet, but hubby can't wait to make pancakes this weekend and use this as a topping!  Yum! 

Who can blame me for having Bob Marley's "Jammin'" stuck in my head for the last few days....

Hot Date

Guess who has a hot date with the canner....