Pickling 2009

It seemed a little stunted early on but the garden is finally doing well. Though the pumpkins are getting huge and taking over, we had enough beans and cucumbers today do a pickling session this afternoon.

I got mixed reviews from the sweet pickles from last year so I thought I'd change it up a little this year. I think they came out just fine but it just seems that most the folks I know just prefer dill. This year, I decided to go the dill route. We purchased, from the OP Farmer's Market, fresh red garlic, dill, and hot peppers to complete the recipe. For the recipes, I found a couple online that looked good. The beans are brined with 2c each of water and white wine vinegar with 1/4c of salt, boiled. This is then poured over the beans, garlic, hot pepper, dill, and peppercorns that I jammed into a jar. The dill pickles were similar except I didn't use any pepper, used regular distilled vinegar, and put much more garlic and dill in the jars. All of the jars were processed for 12 minutes in boiling water. The afternoon's efforts yielded 8 jars of pickles and 4 jars of beans. Supposedly they will be ready in 6 weeks. I'll update you when the tasting begins.
A side note: I will be planting more beans and will also try peas next year. They have been the easiest crop and they taste great.

You want the fruit?... ...You can't handle the fruit!!!

We've got raspberries, tons of them. Usually we are picking a couple pints a day for a week or so, This year, it is insane. We are picking over two quarts a day since last Monday.

I've been eating as many as I can, we've been giving them away, and we've been freezing a few but still, they keep piling up.I decided to try my hand at making some preserves. How tough could that be? The salsa and pickles from last year came out just fine. Well, it can be very tough. My preserves/jam/jelly sucks. My first attempt, a recipe of equal parts sugar and raspberries, yielded two and a half jars of a thick syrup.It wasn't good for bread or sandwiches but tasted just fine over pancakes yesterday. I bet they will be a fine base for raspberry margaritas as well.Since I have plenty of berries and plenty more are ripening each day, I decided to spend a little more time on the internet searching out recipes. My second round went much better. It jelled up properly and isn't too sweet. This recipe combined about 6 cups of fruit, 4 cups of sugar, and a packet of sure-jell. I brought the raspberries to a boil for a few minutes.Added sugar and sure jell and boiled again for about five more minutes.Put the mixture in jars.Processed in boiling water for five more minutes.And voila, I have a ton of preserves. I wonder how much I can fetch for these at the local farmer's market?

If I didn't want to take on another project, I'd say I had to create Tiny Bungalow Jam labels.

Let's see how this turns out

I picked (or better, hacked with a machete) one of the sunflowers yesterday. I am hoping that it dries out and we can have sunflower seeds. It looks fairly promising. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Anyone have tips for this?I also finished canning last night. Work on the garage made me delay the last batch. I roasted corn, onions, garlic and poblano peppers on the grill and combined it with some fresh tomatoes to make a salsa. It tastes pretty good so far. If the canning process works out and it still tastes good in another month, I may do a lot more next year.

If life gives you cucumbers...

...make pickles.

Since my escapades of working on the garage are not worth writing about (and still have me steamed), I figure I'd post about a new endeavor at the Tiny Bungalow that is a bit more positive: canning. I've never done this before but I did watch my mom do it when I was young.

I used about half of our cucumbers and made 8 pints of bread & butter pickles. My family is not a big sweet pickle eater so unless I could find a contractor that would work for pickles, I figured it wasn't worth making any more.
Overall, the canning experience went well, which is a good thing since I have ingredients to make a few pints of salsa for canning tomorrow night. Hopefully that will go just as well. I also hope make some headway with the garage tomorrow and post the long sad story.