Strawberry Season
Strawberries are the first fruit that you need to catch if you are going to preserve any sort of quantity of. They come ripe in about the middle of June…
Cherry Season
We eat cherries for about a week while they are in season but other than that the only cherries we enjoy are of the dehydrated variety. They are kind of like raisins but slightly bigger and great in kids lunches. Each year I dehydrate about 20 racks of cherries, I'm not sure what that is in lbs but I would guess 10-20lbs of cherries.
Drying Greens
Remember all those greens I helped dry last year? I never tasted any of them. I never even heard how it went other than, oh yeah it was awesome. So, note to self, don’t work with that person again if you’d like to actually learn something.
Fast forward to this year and I have been eating lettuce for the past two months like it was going out of season. Because it is. The one thing I noticed last year was a significant lack of green things in our winter storage. So this year I intended to change that and have been dehydrating and blanching up a storm. Sort of, not really. (more…)
Summer Canning
I don’t normally can in July or August. It’s just too darn hot to have the stove on that much. Most of my summer preserving is done with the dehydrator on a table outside. One day I will find a man handy enough and who loves me enough to build me a solar dehydrator but until that day I use the electric variety.
However this year has been unseasonably – um – damp, which would make solar dehydration a little bit tricky. A conversation with a friend revealed the fact that I have never had canned cherries. (more…)
Dehydrating Greens
This past Tuesday I helped a friend of mine with a bit of an experiment. She harvested all of the greens from her mother’s garden and instead of freezing them she is going to try drying them to store instead. We have a lot of the same mindsets when it comes to food storage. The main one being that we would like to rely less on our deep freezes and more on our pantry’s or cold rooms. (more…)
Apricots and Raspberries
We are still picking raspberries. My God. Still. I need a scale to weigh just how many kilos of raspberries we’ve picked. A bloody lot. Raspberries, berries in general do not travel well and by the time the bucket is full and the berries are rinsed they are pretty much mush. Which makes good fruit leather and that is what we have been making.
Note to self: Wax paper is not a good substitute for a fruit leather tray in the dehydrator.
Second note to self: purchase additional fruit leather trays.
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Summer Diets
Our affiliations with food fascinate me. What we eat, when we eat, how we choose it, historically and on an individual basis are all things that I (pardon the pun) am hungry to learn.
I do not eat very much. It’s not a diet or weight thing, I certainly eat when I am hungry I just am so darn busy that I don’t have opportunity to eat a whole lot. Apparently this is a common theme among those who work with the land. This weekend I had the opportunity to chat with one of my favorite local farmers, at a music festival of all places, and apparently his primary diet in the summer is beer! Ha! (more…)
Preserving Summer’s Harvest
I love summer. Who doesn't. But what I love about it is the growing season and how the produce changes as it ripens and becomes ready for harvesting. The kitchen…