Here’s a lovely way to save some time when you prepare apples or Asian pears for canning. Use an apple peeler-corer (see mine at work here) to make beautiful coils of automatically-cored firm fruit. The swirly fruit looks fantastic in the jar, and packs in well for a nice, well-filled raw pack. Don’t get too…
Food Preservation
Ack! My Sauerkraut Has Mold On It!
So you picked up a copy of Wild Fermentation and became a lacto-fermentation groupie, huh? It happens, I get it, it happened to me. And why wouldn’t you want to ferment everything in sight? The result is tasty, nutritious, rooted in the oldest traditions of food preservation and kinda badass in a “I dance with the…
How To Dry And Use Mandarin Orange Peels
I’ll happily throw all my locavore principles under a bus to get at a box of mandarin oranges. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Growing up, Christmas-time meant a box printed with exotic looking Chinese characters, and filled with loose-skinned, paper-wrapped oranges that were sweeter and juicier than any occidental citrus could be. So when mandarin season rolls around, I can’t say…
Storing Winter Squash
To preserve many foods, you have to do a crazy water-bath dance in the heat of late August, or give over to acid-ravaged hands as you chop another ten pounds of tomatoes. Winter squash is easier. Like Goldilocks, all it asks is to be tucked away someplace not too hot, and not too cold, but…
Walnut Lemon Pesto
This Walnut Lemon Pesto has become my go-to pesto recipe in late summer when the basil is huge and really needs to get cut back before it flowers. While I adore a classic pesto, this version has a few advantages over the traditional pine-nut & parm variety. First, it’s way cheaper to make. No $25-a-pound…
Lacto-Fermented Salsa
Regular readers may have gleaned (gleaned – ha! harvesting pun!) that Homebrew Husband and I enjoy fermenting stuff. Right at this exact moment, the following is being (deliberately) fermented in our home: 5 gallons blackberry wine 10 gallons of beer (a carboy of pale ale and another of porter) 2 loaves bread dough homemade yogurt 3…
Lazy Preservation At Its Best: Freezing Peaches
Last week I ordered 100 pounds of peaches from this new fruit CSA from Eastern Washington that serves the greater Seattle area (by the way, for local people, I’ve had great service and fruit from them for an excellent price and will be ordering again soon). After jamming and canning and drying until my floors were…
Easy No-Stick Canning Jar Labels
Last week, just in time for a massive can-o-thon over the weekend, I followed a Facebook recommendation to some fantastic, customizable canning jar labels on Etsy. I’d link to them, but my aging memory and the fast pace of digital life don’t always play nice, so I’ve completely forgotten where I saw them. The neat thing…
Get Off The Rack: A DIY Alternative To The Canning Rack
Most beginner food preservers (and I count myself as an advanced beginner) start with the standard issue water bath canner. It’s usually blue or green with funny speckles on it and can be found pretty cheaply new or really cheaply used. My ginormous canning kettle came from the thrift store and cost, as I recall,…
Culture Your Cukes: Lacto-Fermented Pickles
My pickling cukes are starting to come on, which means it’s time to get cozy with your friend and mine – the beneficial microbe! I am a tremendous fan of pickling through lacto-fermentation. Think of it as yogurt making with vegetables. Beneficial bacteria chomps down on the natural sugars and starches in the vegetable and converts it…
A Time And Motion Study Of Strawberries
The ol’ homestead is not yet up to growing all the strawberries my family will eat in a year. We used to have an enormous berry patch and could barely keep up on the harvest, but these days we have one main berry bed that’s situated in far too shady a spot for berries. There…
Beer: A Historical Look At Food Adulteration
We tend to think of the problems of our age as new problems. Take, for example, food adulteration. When you hear about children dying from melamine-tainted infant formula it’s easy to conclude that the food supply is starting to go to hell in a hand-basket. Without minimizing the seriousness of modern food supply adulteration, I’d suggest…