Last Batch of Salsa

One of my highest priorities this summer was to preserve as much salsa as I possibly could. Salsa is by far my favorite condiment. I love the zestiness, and it's healthy, because it's pretty much nothing but vegetables. When the tomatoes first became ripe, I would make fresh salsa pretty much everyday. I love it. It tastes like summer itself, but I want to eat salsa all year, so I was going to have to do some canning. It was a lot of work, but anybody can do it. Almost everything going into my salsa came from the garden, with the exception of the vinegar and the salt. Unfortunately, I also had to buy some of the onions. I had a nice little onion crop, but we ate them all before the end of the summer, and salsa calls for a lot of onions. One other minor annoyance is that I planted so much cilantro, but most of it went to seed before I started making the salsa. I was able to salvage some of it, and I had quite a bit of parsley and spicy basil, so I added those to make sure the salsa had some herbal freshness.

I had a salsa recipe, but I only followed it loosely. I generally made it in batches with a base of about 20 pounds of tomatoes, so my recipe was something like this:

• 20 lbs. tomatoes
• 6 onions
• 4 bell peppers (various colors if possible)
• 20 jalapenos (or any chili pepper)
• 1/4 c. kosher salt
• 1 c. vinegar
• 1 c. mixed herbs (cilantro, parsley, and basil)

 I started by coring the tomatoes and putting them in the food processor. I put them in a 12 qt. pot (sometimes I need more than 1 pot) over medium heat, and I repeated the process for the rest of the vegetables. I then added the salt, vinegar, and herbs. After all the ingredients were added I would bring them to a boil, and let it boil for a couple of hours until it got nice and thick. When it got close to being done. I brought the 21 qt. canning pot to a boil. I then added the salsa to some clean qt. jars; added the lids; and submerged them in the canning pot for about 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, I got them out, and let them cool while the seal formed. I ended up making over 20 qts. Now they're up on the top shelf with the other preserves. Dwindling faster than I would like them to.

Fresh Pressed Cider

It's not even fall, and I've already had an opportunity to put my new hand-built cider press to work. My dad knows a manager of an orchard, and he let us go and pick a few bushels worth of McIntosh drops. Ideally, cider comes from a mix of apples, but it's fine to do it with whatever is available. I didn't have a bushel basket, so I don't know exactly how many we got. I do know that a five gallon pale filled with apples yielded about one gallon of cider. From the apples we picked, I got about six gallons. I'm turning five of the gallons into a sparkling hard cider, and we just drank the other gallon. It was a lot of work to get six gallons of cider with the cider press. The bulk of the work consists of chopping the apples before they go into the press. I was using a food processor, but it still took three or four hours to get everything pressed into cider. Next year I'll buy a grinder which will greatly expedite the process.

The fresh cider was crisp and tasty. My mom made some cinnamon and sugar doughnuts that went with it excellently. I'm interested to see how my hard cider turns out. With the exception of pressing the apples, it's supposed to be quite a bit easier than brewing beer, but it does take longer. Some people like to make it during the fall, and not drink it until the following year, but a couple of months should be enough. Mine has been in the basement fermenting for about a week now. I took a small risk by not adding campden tablets. They are supposed to kill the natural yeasts, which can possibly add off flavors to the cider. Not all people add them, but most do. I like the idea of going as natural as possible. I did add some champagne yeast, but I'll let the natural yeasts live. If I don't give it a try, I'll never know. I do have some tablets, so I might use them during the next batch. I'll let the yeasts do there job for another week, and then I'll transfer it to a five gallon carboy, where it will set until it clears. After it clears, I'll bottle it in a manner similar to the beer bottling process; Where I dissolve some sugar in boiling water, add it to the cider, and put it in bottles, while the yeasts turn the sugar into CO2.

Cider Press

I just completed my cider press. This was probably the most ambitious of my summer projects. I have very little wood working experience. I think I got a C in shop class in eighth grade. I bought a plan from ebay. The plan included all the hardware for $75. I had to buy the lumber separately, which was another $65. I have to admit that when I first got the plans; I was so overwhelmed that I almost sent everything back. It wasn't so much that I didn't think I could do it, but I just didn't have the equipment I needed. I give credit to my mom for talking me out of it. I thought about renting a table saw, but I looked on Craigslist, and I found one for $50. I figured that was better than renting one, since that would probably cost about the same. I also needed a drill press and a jig saw, and I ended up borrowing those from friends.  After that, I pretty much just followed the instructions. Everything is not as straight and tight as it could be if it were done by a master wood worker, but I'm pretty sure it will serve me well. For now, I will need to put the apples through a food processor before I press them to maximize efficiency. Maybe next year I'll get an apple grinder, so I can skip that step. I'm looking forward to making some nice raw, unpasteurized cider, and some sparkling hard cider.

Blueberries from the Argyle Swamp

Dad and I drove out to the Argyle Swamp. We entered it from Mills RD. just west of Banner RD. We didn't have to walk too far back to find some great picking. Probably less than a half a mile back is where we encountered our first blueberry bush. It was the first of many loaded bushes. We picked for a little over two hours, and we got 13 pounds of wild blueberries. I'd like to go at least one more time in the next week and get another load.

The Brutal Reality of the Simple Life

It's easy to forget about the darker side of living off the land. Most of us have idyllic images of juicy tomatoes, clucking chickens, and attractive red barns when we think of organic gardening, but sometimes things happen that remind us that good intentions are not enough to hide from mother nature's dark side.

Like a lot of rural households, we have a couple of dogs. My dad has a rat terrier named Chip, and my mom has a miniature dachshund named Sally. As you can see by the picture below, she's not a startling image of ferocity.

Despite many years of anthropomorphizing dogs as cuter and cuddlier versions of us; They descend from a long bloodline of killing machines. Otherwise, they never would've made it to where they have today. Sally is an uber affectionate, slightly dimwitted dog that is addicted to belly rubs, but she snuck out of the house the other day, and brutally mauled one of my chickens to death. I was pretty annoyed, but I can't blame her for it. Nature puts us in a position where we have to live off the death of other organisms. Which brings me to my next story.

Raccoons are a consistent menace to rural households. Every night they are trying to kill my chickens. They haven't been successful this year, but they've killed many of them in the past. In addition to harassing the chickens; They will eat every ear of my sweet corn if I let them, so I am forced to respond to nature with a little brutality of my own. My uncle Paul gave me a coon trap when I got the chickens, and told me I had to use it. I was really hesitant, because I'm not comfortable killing animals I'm not going to eat, but they are stealing food from me. I had to make a decision. Am I going to grow my corn to feed the raccoons, or do I want to eat it? I decided I wanted to eat it, so I set the trap with some doughnuts as bate. The first time I set it; There was a raccoon in there the next morning, and I had to shoot him in the head with a .22 at point blank range. I cannot emphasize enough that I took absolutely no pleasure in this chore. It pains me greatly that life is a constant struggle between various organisms trying to survive, but it does me no good to hide from this reality.

The purpose of this blog entry is to remind everyone that organic gardening and small scale agriculture are not as idyllic as we would all like it to be, and I apologize if the subject matter is a little harsh for some of you, but I want this blog to be a legitimate journal of both my successes and my struggles, so I think it's important not to misrepresent my summertime experiment as all pleasure and no pain. 

Homemade

In this simple living, self-sufficiency project I'm undergoing, I'd like to be able to harvest all my food from my garden, but that's simply not possible. Given that limitation, I'm trying to do the next best thing. I cook from scratch whenever possible, and buy very few processed foods. Three staples that I've been cooking regularly are bread, noodles, and tortillas. I can't grow wheat for the flour, but flour is very cheap, and all of these things taste better homemade than store bought.

Homemade bread is pretty common, and everyone loves it, but I hate turning the oven on in the summer time. Mom has a bread-maker, and she uses it regularly, but I found another alternative. Mother Earth has a great recipe for five minute bread. The dough is made in advanced, and the bread is made on the stove-top anytime bread is wanted. It's absolutely delicious, and I can use it in conjunction with other homemade foods, such as hummus and pesto. It also works really well for stove-top pizza.

The other two are a little less common. I love making homemade noodles. It's a great way to use my excess basil. In a food processor, it's extremely simple. I toss a cup of basil, two cups of flour, two eggs, and a teaspoon of salt. I turn it on until a ball forms. After letting the dough rest for about a half-hour; I role it flat with a rolling pin, cut it up, and drop it in the pot for a few minutes. I topped it off with a simple homemade tomato sauce, and some freshly grated Parmesan cheese. 

Homemade tortillas are even simpler, and just as important, they are infinitely better than most store-bought tortillas. I've been making these regularly, because we've been eating a lot of mom's homemade salsa from last year, and I'll be making them a lot when the tomatoes ripen, and I can start making some raw salsa. Like the noodles, a food processor makes these extremely easy, but they are easy enough without it. There are many variations, but the simplest one I found has 3 c. of flour, 1/3 c. oil, 1 tsp. salt, and 1 c. of warm water. Put it all in the food processor till it forms a ball, flour the counter and roll them out with a rolling pin. Fry them up, and that's all there is too it.

Preservation

I'm definitely at the point where the garden is producing more than we can eat on any given day. It's not an extreme overabundance, but unless we want to eat zucchini six times a day; We need to find ways to preserve it. The serious preservation project will come when the tomatoes start to come on a little stronger, but for now, we're doing a little bit of freezing, and a little bit of pickling.

The freezing was very simple. Some people online were suggesting doing a few things to the zucchini before freezing it, but a number of people said it can easily be shredded and froze, with no additional preparation. After picking and scrubbing all of the zucchini and yellow squash; I brought out the food processor, and attached the shredding blade. That made the process quite easy. I generally use the shredded zucchini to make zucchini pancakes. That's a savory dish that resembles hash browns more than zucchini bread, which is also an excellent use of shredded zucchini.
The turnip crop was another one that was starting to wear me down. I really like turnips, but it can be exhausting coming up with different ways to cook them. They were starting to get too big, and I didn't want them to start to get woody and flavorless, so I yanked them all out, and found a nice pickling recipe in my favorite cookbook, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. His recipe for Three-Day Pickles is a nice simple refrigerator pickle recipe. It can be used on just about anything. I used it on the turnips, and mom used a similar one on the cucumbers.

• 2 lbs. of vegetable
• 6 tbs. salt (kosher or sea)
• 2 c. white vinegar
• 1/4 c. sugar
• 1/4 c. pickling spice.

Slice the vegetables up, and put 2 tbs. salt on them; letting them sit for two hours. Rinse them, and pat them dry. Put remaining ingredients in a sauce pan and bring it to boil. Let it cool for a couple of minutes than pour it over the vegetables (I also included some fresh chillies for a little kick) and let it cool to room temperature. Transfer them to an airtight jar, and put them in the fridge. They can be eaten in three days, and will keep for three weeks.