The Fruits of our Labor

I promised updates on the whole "preserving" deal. We have begun our quest for buying as much fresh and local foods as possible now and preserving them for consumption later this fall and winter. So far, our canning efforts have produced some of "Peggy's Sunshine Dill Pickles" (recipe courtesy of Adam's late grandmother Peggy). The idea behind these pickles is setting them out in the sunshine gives an extra special something during the curing process. It was a little ironic that the following four days after we made these pickles, it proceeded to rain.....It's okay. It's sunny now.

We couldn't find fresh cukes anywhere at the farmer's markets this weekend (we were impatient and wanted to make them NOW), so we bought some regular old cucumbers and quartered them up. We did use the cayenne peppers and garlic we bought at the market last week, so we got that going for us at least. Much to Adam's disappointment, we saw an abundance of pickling cucumbers yesterday at our farmer's market (after we already made ours). We shoulda waited! Oh well, they look cool anyway AND they are gonna be some spicy dills that's for sure.

We bought 25 lbs. of tomatoes. Yes, that's right. We're gonna start out dehydrating most of these, as all the tomato canning recipes call for 45 lbs. of tomatoes. So, this morning, I boiled about 15 lbs. of them for 30 seconds, slipped the skins off, cored them and sliced them up evenly and layed them all out in pretty rows on our dehydrater. Apparently this is a great way of preserving them (kind of like sundried tomatoes I suppose). I'll let you know how they turn out. We probably won't be eating them for a while though....

What else?......Oh yes, the BERRIES. We bought a half a flat of bluebs and half a flat of blackberries. Even though its very difficult for Adam to save the berries for later (every time I turn around he's got another handful of them), we bought some extra this time for freezing. The best way to do this is wash and dry them, lay them flat on cookie sheets and put in freezer until frozen. Then transfer to freezer bags. The laying flat on the trays prevents huge ice/berry chunks.

You may ask, "How do they know how to do this stuff?" Well, with help from this handy-dandy little blue book of preserving, we have all the information we need to can, freeze or dehydrate anything we want.

I figured since I was learnng to become so domestic-y, I needed an apron. I found this one at House of Vintage in the Hawthorne District. It says "Happy Days" on it and it displays a martini. I don't really understand it, but it somehow fits. :) Stay tuned, as there will be more on these endeavors in the kitchen.....