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.

Strawberries!

Strawberry prices in the city never seem to come down enough to make them seem economical, even at the peak of the season. Thank god for Niagara, where you can get bulk quantities of berries and fruit at reasonable prices.

In this case, I managed to get a gorgeous flat of strawberries for $18. I decided on two different canning recipes: a very traditional jam from Blue Ribbon, and a modern interpretation of strawberry balsamic jam from Eugenia Bone.

The traditional jam? Absolute perfection. I used liquid pectin which set the jam beautifully. The yield was perfect too: seven half-pint jars.

The balsamic jam? A very different process. Instead of thickening with pectin, the strawberries were cooked for a very long time (45 minutes). While it resulted in beautiful thickness, the down-side was a huge reduction in volume, using almost twice as many berries for much less yield than the traditional.

Still, the addition of the best balsamic vinegar gave it an incredibly rich flavour: dark and complex. It looks amazing.

Asparagus, Round 3 goes to Chris!

Well, it's been a while since my last entry. Not because I've lost the canning spirit, but rather because, besides asparagus and rhubarb, there's nothing else to can at this time of year! It has been a warm spring and the strawberries are here early, but yesterday was the first time they were at the market, and they were $6/quart, which is too steep for my canning requirements. I'm hoping to pick my own in the next couple of weeks.

After the asparagus canning fiasco, I've been freezing it because the results are entirely predictable. But I was moving jars onto a different shelf in my basement and was irritated to see the two measly pint jars that I had pickled. Asparagus is still cheap at the market and the stalks are gorgeous, so I decided to give it one final try.

I cut up five pounds just like last time, but this time, while preparing the brine, I was shocked to see that in the recipe I'm suppose to dilute the vinegar solution by 50% by adding the same amount of water. How did I miss this last time? Suddenly my wizened asparagus are starting to make more sense. I had no idea how much vinegar went into pickles and assumed you just used pure vinegar? Hmm, in hindsight I couldn't even breathe when I was filling the jars, the smell was so strong, I suppose that should have been a warning that I was doing something wrong.

THIS time, I used the right brine, the right sized asparagus, and I packed them as directed. The result? The proper amount of pickled asparagus (3 quarts instead of 2) that look much more similar to the photo in the book!

Maybe I can feed the over-vinegared jars to the dog or something...

YIELD: win!

Rhubarb overload

For some reason the rhubarb I buy in the spring at the farmers' market is always smaller than what I remember eating as a kid. But then, I don't think I really liked rhubarb as a kid: I just liked dipping the stalks in sugar.

And honestly, I'm not convinced I like rhubarb as an adult. The only times I've really used it is in making a strawberry-rhubarb sour cream streusel coffee cake, and as you can imagine, there are a bunch of other flavours competing with it. So I decided to see if I can make something that the adult me will enjoy, and I chose rhubarb conserve.

So what's a conserve? In theory made from a fruit steeped in sugar where the fruit still maintains some semblance of structure. By that description, the mango jam I made earlier is really a conserve.

This conserve called for a number of other ingredients, most notably whole oranges and lemons (peel too -- just seeds removed). I was a bit suspicious about the theoretical yield: supposedly 7 half pints, because it seemed like I had a LOT of product. Nonetheless, what do I know? I just sterilized 7 half pint jars and cooked up the conserve.

Well of course, when it came time to actually fill the jars, I realized early on that I was going to have waaaay to much. I guessed at least another 4 half pints, so I frantically found more jars and got them boiling in the water bath. I put the lids on the 7 jars I had ready and waited for the others. I kept the conserve warm on the stove until I could fill them all, then put all 11 in the water bath.

The output? Pretty attractive jars that are highlighted by specks of lemon and orange. The recipe called for a 1/4" headspace, but most of the jars had a bit of stickiness in the threads of the rings when I cleaned the jars, so be warned: if I hadn't taken off the rings and washed them and cleaned the jars, I would be having a hard time removing the lids in six months.

YIELD VERDICT: semi-WIN! (pain in the ass boiling more jars, but more conserve, yay!)

CANNING VERDICT: WIN!

Canning sunshine - mango jam!

More mangoes! This week's attempt is mango jam. I've never actually tasted mango jam before, but the concept appealed to me so I decided to give it a try. I used Amendt's Blue Ribbon Preserves for the recipe.

I'm starting to discover that mango canning recipes use a lot fewer mangoes than I thought they would. Today's jam recipe called for 4 1/2 cups of chopped mango -- which worked out to seven mangoes. Which means I'm sitting on 28 more trying to figure out what to do!

The second discovery is that jam requires a LOT of sugar -- in this case 7 cups! When I put the mango and sugar together in a pot, I thought there was no way there would be enough liquid in the mango to dissolve the sugar. How wrong I was. And what an incredibly bright mix!

Preparation was pretty much a snap: macerate the mango in sugar for a few hours, then cook it down, add pectin, and can. The vibrant colour was a bit more subdued after cooking, but after emerging from the water bath it still looked gorgeous.

YIELD VERDICT: WIN!

CANNING VERDICT: WIN!

BROKEN GLASS: NONE!

All in all, a great canning!

Asparagus, my bitter enemy.

Oh, asparagus, why do you task me so?

Another weekend at the market, another chance to pick up cheap asparagus. I was gratified this week to find the price had dropped to $1 per small bunch, and the quality was amazing, so I bought 20 bunches, about 7 pounds.

In previous years, I've always just blanched and frozen it. After last week's low-yield pickling experiment, this week I thought I would try pressure canning. I bought this ridiculously large 22 quart pressure canner a few months ago only to discover that 99% of the things I was interested in canning didn't require it. Time to finally put it to use.

First step is cutting the asparagus spears to the right length, about 5 3/4 inches to fit into a quart jar. Lots of asparagus ends to go into the soup pot, which was fine with me. Then quick blanching of the spears and ice-bath cooling. Then packing into jar and into the pressure canner for 40 minutes. What could be simpler?

Actually it WAS simple! My 7 pounds of asparagus yielded 4 quarts canned, which was more than the recipe said I could expect. Of course, the asparagus gods couldn't let me off the hook that easily -- when I opened the canner and lifted out the first jar: DISASTER! The jar came out just fine, the problem was that the contents remained in the pot -- the bottom of the jar had sheared right off. Grrr. With trepidation I removed the other three -- all fine, thank god.

The other weird thing is how much liquid escaped from the cans. I left a 1 inch headspace but as you can see I lost almost another entire inch of liquid. I think that the canner took too long to get to full pressure, so the cans were boiling for overly long. We'll see if I die when I finally open the jar and eat the asparagus. I don't even want to think about the cost per quart: about $7 plus an hour of my time.

YIELD VERDICT: hmmm, kind of a push

CANNING VERDICT: FAIL? that airspace scares me

Mango Chutney: seasonal, yes; cheap, yes; local, no.

Okay, two out of three isn't bad. I live in the area of Toronto called Little India. I adore it here because there's such an incredible diversity of cultures here, and it's all reflected in the food and produce.

I'm always ecstatic when it's mango season. I don't actually know why there are seasons for mangoes since they are imported up from the tropics, but for whatever reason, the best ones always seem to be available in the spring. And my favourite is the small, unassuming yellow ataulfo mango. I was taking a taxi home from a meeting in the evening and as we drove down through Little India I noted the tell-tale sign of stacks of yellow cardboard crates outside my favourite grocer. I yelled "STOP!" to the taxi driver, which resulted in me almost being flung through the windshield, and when I explained that I screamed because I wanted mangoes he just stared at me in disgust.

I bought three cases of mangoes, each with 14 mangoes tucked away within, and carried them home (yes, the taxi ditched me). Though my arms were screaming from the weight when I finally walked in the door, I felt triumphant. There is simply nothing better than the taste of a ripe mango, I've sat and cut up five in a sitting and eaten them all one after another (PSA: you WILL feel sick after this). I was really excited to think that, the following winter, I could be making mango lassis using my perfectly preserved fruit.

Since most of the mangoes weren't ripe, I decided that my first attempt would be Mango Chutney. The recipe came from the Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving, and quite frankly, had more ingredients than I would have thought possible. It included:

• 4 cups mango, chopped
• 1 cup onions, chopped
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup cider vinegar
• 3/4 cup golden raisins
• 1/2 cup limes, chopped and seeded
• 1/2 cup oranges, chopped and seeded
• 1/4 cup lemon, chopped and seeded
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/2 cup ginger, chopped
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 2 tbsp cilantro, chopped
• 1 tbsp mustard seed
• 1 tsp hot pepper flakes
• 1 tsp cinnamon, ground
• 1/4 tsp cloves, ground
• 1/4 tsp allspice, ground

I had bought all of these ingredients in anticipation of this happy day, so I was ready to go!

The recipe was surprisingly simple: basically dump it all together and cook it, then ladle into hot jars and process in a water bath for 10 minutes. Before canning it, the mango chunks were bright and lively, but after canning, the chutney took on a much more sophisticated colour, dark and brooding and powerful.

The yield was precisely what was advertised in the book: 6 half-pint jars from 4 cups of chopped mango. There was a tiny bit extra that I tasted, and it packed a kick! The seals on all the jars stuck and I'm now the proud owner of six bundles of mango joy, ready to brighten up some simple steamed fish dish that I'll make. I'll be sure to report on how it tastes.

CANNING VERDICT: WIN!

The cost per can is something like $1 per half-pint. Once the rest of these mangoes have ripened up, it's time to make jam and chunks in syrup and maybe, if I'm really daring, mango curd (what's daring about it? how about the fact that making 3 half-pints calls for ELEVEN eggs!).

Desperately seeking botox for my asparagus

Last year I went a bit asparagus-crazy and I froze 20 large ziplock bags of asparagus. We just finished the last bag a couple of weeks ago, and while it was delicious, they really softened up in the freezer and this year I wanted to do something about the texture.

I found a fantastic recipe for pickled asparagus in Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved. The picture in the book showed amazingly plump spears that just begged to be snapped in half. I was sold. So when I found the first spring crop of asparagus at the farmers' market, I went a bit nuts and bought 10 bunches for $15, a STEAL, and went home clucking with contentment.

Of course, things went less smoothly from that point. The first step in the recipe was to cut the asparagus so that the pieces didn't extend past the threads of the pint jars. Hmmm. Well, I had bought long bunches of thin spears, and my 2.5 lbs of asparagus quickly became 1 lb of asparagus. No problem, I would just use the discarded ends for soup.

My next problem: no dill seed. I have approximately 3,000 different vials of spices in my house, yet somehow none of them were dill. So back to the grocery store to buy dill seed, but this brief foray improbably ended with me purchasing a $500 air conditioning unit at Canadian Tire. Go figure.

So it's two hours later and I'm ready to continue with the recipe. As directed, I lightly blanch the asparagus and then chill it, while I work on the hot vinegar pickling mix. I must confess the pickling mix smelled divine, very simple but somehow sophisticated, with coriander and cumin seeds vying with the dill.

I then pack my pint jars with the asparagus and cover with vinegar. Into the hot water bath for 10 minutes of hard boiling, and then out to cool. The book told me to leave the jars undisturbed for 5 hours.

When I returned to the jars, THIS is what I found: what had previously been asparagus now looked like asparagus jerky, the moisture pulled completely out of the stalks and now wizened with more creases than Larry King's forehead. And it looks like Hurricane Katrina went through the jar.

Oh, and I didn't mention the yield: TWO PINTS. An hour of work for two pints of asparagus. So not including my time, the cost per jar worked out to something like $10. Not exactly meeting my bargain requirement.

And if you include the goddamn air conditioner, it's more like $260 per jar. For mummified asparagus. Let's hope it tastes better than it looks.

YIELD VERDICT: FAIL
APPEARANCE VERDICT: NASTY

As an aside, the soup I made with the cast off bits was AMAZING!

A man, a plan, a can.

Okay, so I'm not sure whether I'm writing this out of romanticized (and plagiarized) notions after watching Julie and Julia or not, but welcome to my canning blog! Here I hope to share, publicly, my random successes and, more likely, my epic failures as I attempt to master the basics of home canning.

Why can? Well, I think the idea crystallized in my head one day this past winter when I was standing in a grocery store, staring ruefully into a bin of rather pathetic-looking red peppers from Chile with the astronomical price tag of $4.99/lb. Flash back to four months earlier when I was standing outside a vegetable stall at the amazing St. Lawrence Farmers' Market in Toronto. On this fine summer day, there were half-bushel baskets of glorious red peppers for $10.00. $10.00 for 15 pounds of peppers, versus $5.00 for 1 pound. But August-Chris was a narcissist who didn't care about December-Chris's plight. He just looked at the half-bushel for a moment, shrugged and walked away thinking, "What on earth am I going to do with that many peppers?" Now December-Chris found himself consigned to a tasteless, watery, EXPENSIVE fate.

No more! I vowed to myself that, starting the next spring, every time I found seasonal cheap local produce, I would buy it and somehow preserve it. I'd never canned before, so I bought myself all the necessary equipment, a bunch of books, and I waited.

Well, it's May now, and spring has sprung, and the first crops of the new season are out, so it's time to begin the experiment!