Bountiful harvest kicking blogger's ass.

I realize that it's been over two months since my last blog post, and I must apologize to the one or two readers who have actually followed this blog. By this point, I'm guessing my readership is down to zero, so I think I'm actually writing this post just to myself.

An absence of posts doesn't mean an absence of activity! Over the past two months I've canned many, many items. I've documented all my canning with lots of pics and notes but just haven't had the time to put it into posts. I can tell you that I must have at least 250 jars in my basement right now. Here's the list of everything I've made:

mango chutney

mango jam

rhubarb-mango preserve

cherry jam

strawberry jam

strawberry balsamic jam

raspberry jam

raspberry jelly

dill pickles

spicy dill pickles

brined dill pickles

pickled beans

sweet pickles

pickled cauliflower

pickled asparagus

canned asparagus

strawberry jam #2

strawberry jelly

blueberry jam

blueberry-basil vinegar

peach jam

peach-apricot jam

peach bbq sauce

peaches in syrup

peaches in apple sauce

plum-walnut conserve

roasted plums

spicy plum sauce

apricot-amaretto jam

nectarine jam

roasted red peppers

portuguese red pepper sauce

red pepper jelly

traditional italian tomato sauce

seasoned tomato sauce

canned tomatoes

pizza sauce

grape jelly

So I hope you'll forgive me for being a bit behind, at least until the harvest is finally over? There are tomatoes bubbling on the stove right now, I'm hoping by Thanksgiving I'll switch to the eating phase of my canning plan!

Mixed sweet pickles without the mix, or pickled cauliflower

I remember as a kid that we would always keep both dill and mixed sweet pickles on hand. I never really understood why cauliflower was included in the "mix" but this was was my favourite pickled vegetable at the time, though I couldn't stand it any other way.

Well, I like cauliflower in all its forms now but want to relive the glory of my youth with these pickles.

My Eugenia Bone recipe for these called for a couple of pounds of cauliflower, blanched and then hot-packed. As I'm starting to discover is par for the course, the quantities of her recipes never seem to turn out as expected. In this case, I had extra cauliflower at the end but not nearly enough broth to pack six quarts. VERY frustrating to have to make up more broth at the end! But I'm hoping it will be worth it months from now when I enjoy these pickles.

Bread and Butter Pickles

Okay, yes I bought more cucumbers. After all my complaining before, you would think that I had enough. Well, the eight quarts I bought previously were all too small to slice properly for sweet pickles. As baby dills, they were perfect, but I had to wait a couple of weeks for their larger brother to arrive.

I only bought a single two-quart basic, which turned out to be more than enough for six pints of pickles. The process is a bit more complex than straight hot- or cold-packing. The cucumbers and onions have to be sliced, mixed with salt and allowed to sit for a few hours. Traditionalist recipes call for overnight brining. My Bernardin recipe called for 2 hours, whereas the recipe on pre-fab sweet pickling spice mixes is only 30 minutes. I figured that taking the middle road was best.

And by the way, how many of you thought that pickles had salt in them? After all, you see "pickling salt" available at the stores, but it seems like its primary purpose is to be used BEFORE the pickling process to draw some of the liquid out of the pickles. I have yet to try to brine-cure pickles (the same way they make sauerkraut) but I'm curious to see how they turn out.

After soaking, they're warmed in a hot vinegar bath and packed. As you can see from the colour, tumeric takes centre stage in this recipe and I'll be trying to get the stains off my countertops for a long time to come. But I ended up with six perfect pints of pickles. Oh, and this time I also added Pickle Crisp, Bernardin's brand name for calcium chloride that is added to maintain the texture of the pickles. I didn't use any of this in my dills, so it will be interesting to see how they compare.

Bean pickles? YES!

The beans are out and they are amazing this year. Actually, all the produce I've bought has been amazing, the only negative has been the price of buying it here in the city. But outside the city, there are definitely deals to be had.

I bought five pounds of green and yellow beans -- dry, cool, crisp -- absolute perfection. And what better thing to do with wonderful fresh produce than to embalm it in vinegar! I figure I have a few more weeks to buy beans to freeze; these guys were going into jars.

I used a dilled bean recipe that is very similar to conventional pickles, with the addition of red peppers for colour. I know, the colour looks a bit washed out in the photo but they look fine.

The Bernardin recipe had a stated yield of 6 pints but unfortunately, I ended up with seven (how this is even possible when using WEIGHT as a measure, I'm not sure) and of course I only had brine for 6, so I had to quickly whip up some additional brine for the 7th. It was worth it!

Make the cucumbers stop!

Warning to anyone tempted to follow my footsteps into canning insanity. DON'T buy several baskets of cucumbers thinking it's a quick simple process to turn them into pickles. It's not quick. It's not simple. And you may permanently smell like vinegar. I do.

So having never made pickles before and standing in the market without having first checking a recipe, the primary challenge is to try to guess how many to buy! I looked at the two quart baskets for $5.50 and really had no clue how many jars I could expect to fill. No clue. So I bought four baskets and hoped that I wasn't getting too few.

Well, it worked out I had purchased somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18 pounds of cucumbers. That's a lot. DO NOT BUY 18 POUNDS OF CUCUMBERS!

I decided to try several different recipes. First, I would use the traditional Blue Ribbon dill method that involves long, slow brining of at least 24 hours. Then I would also make quick cold pack dills using prefab pickling mixes.

The brined pickles were relatively straightforward but SLOW to produce. 24 hours of brining was followed with 24 hours of soaking in vinegar solution. Well, Blue Ribbon let me down. The amount of vinegar mix they recommended wasn't nearly enough to cover all the pickles, and some of them poked out for the day (we'll see if I survive), not by a mile, and this is even after I had pared down the number of cucumbers it called for. But in the end, I got six pints of pickles, so I was placated.

The quick dills are much less work. Cut the ends off the cucumbers, wash them off, pack them, and then add the vinegar broth (which is basically just white vinegar and the packet of spice). I spruced up the jars by adding different things. Some got beautiful fresh dill weed that I bought. Some included garlic. In others I included hot peppers that I had dried a couple years ago. I primarily filled quart jars just to try to get them processed more quickly. But even so, the effort required was something like 6 hours over the weekend and another 6 hours on a Monday night after work (I was pickling til 1 in the morning), the whole time steam spewing from the canning pot and vinegar vapour curling my nose hairs. The dog hid outside the entire evening and coughed.

But the end result was something like 9 quart jars of pickles and at least 6 pint jars, so 12 quarts overall. Can anyone even EAT that many pickles in a year? And that doesn't even include the sweet pickles that I intend to make later.

Next time, I'm just buying ONE basket.

Raspberry time!

I've gone to the local market a couple of times and found half-pint baskets of raspberries for $4. At that price,jam madewith it would be impossibly expensive. So I hopped in the car and headed up to Whittamore's Farm, a great pick-your-own and farmer's market northeast of the city. It was definitely the right choice.

The country store was loaded with gorgeous fresh local produce. Beans and peas and new potatoes and tomatoes and summer squash. And raspberries! Flats of raspberries for only $28. Compare that with the $48 I would have paid buying the same flat from the local market. Crazy.

So I bought two flats, froze a bunch for winter consumption and decided to make a jam AND a jelly, both from Blue Ribbon.

The jam was relatively straightforward, but the recipe wisely suggested removing about 3/4th of the seeds from the pulp when crushing the fruit. Happily, I bought a tomato de-seeder a few months ago in anticipation of saucing season, but it was perfectly suited for the raspberries as well. Amazing device that pours out raspberry pulp and juice on one side, seeds on the other.

The jam set perfectly, I started packing into quarter-pint jars for gift purchases, I ended up getting a total of 4 half-pint and 6 quarter-pint jars.

The JELLY was a different story. Lots of steps: first freeze the berries (in theory they yield more juice), then thaw, then crush, then simmer, then sieve, then filter through cheesecloth, again and again, and then filter through coffee filters. The result is supposed to be a crystal-clear, ruby-coloured juice that produces a crystal-clear, ruby-coloured jelly.

The problem is that raspberry juice isn't thin -- it's thick! Thick and unwilling to drip through cheesecloth, never mind coffee filters. After I had filtered it several times through the cheesecloth, I filled a coffee filter with the juice and it sat there for half an hour before a couple drops of juice passed through it. Out of frustration I just made jelly from the thicker juice. The result was a gorgeous flavourful jelly but by no mean crystal clear. Still, it tastes amazing! :)

Grrr Cherries!

I love cherries and I really love the ones grown in Niagara. When I was down there a few weeks ago, I bought basket after basket from road-side stands, the berries picked mere minutes before.

I managed to stop myself from eating all of them and brought a couple 2 quart baskets back home. I recently bought a cherry-pitter which simplified the process of preparing the cherries a great deal!

As usual, my first reference for jam was Blue Ribbon. The recipe itself was simple: bring to a boil, add the pectin, reboil and then can. Very simple.

The yield was great and the colour was wonderful. However, I was really disappointed because the jam didn't set properly -- it was more of a syrup than a jam. Sure enough, I checked a number of other cherry jam recipes and discovered that they need TWO pouches of pectin, not one. I'm not sure if this was a problem with the recipe or a problem with my choice of cherries. I used regular sweet cherries but the recipe called for Bing cherries. Are they somehow more substantial? I'm not sure, but I do know that I don't actually have any cherry jam. I could have re-heated the jam and then added more pectin, but I think I'll wait to get more cherries and try with them.