I'm here, just a bit overtaken by events. Should be back this weekend, probably Sunday after the Girl's birthday party and the resolution of a small amount of familial drama.
And then? I want to talk about All Recipes a bit, gelatin desserts, my favorite canning books and why I want 2008 to be the Year of the Dinner Party.
This woman has much more ambition than I. Much more. She has resolved, in that New Yearsy kind of way, to use her slow cooker every day and post the results every day. Stunt blogging can be really fun and interesting (see also: the original Julie/Julia Project) or boring and sanctimonious (see also: No Impact Man). This has some potential, I think, for hitting me in a few interesting spots: cooking, family, money, creativity, etc., etc., etc. I like that she, so far at least, uses real food (marshmallows for the sweet potato casserole notwithstanding) and seems to avoid cream 'o whatnot condensed soups and the like. Definitely some possibilities there.
Finding the blog was good timing since I have been trying hard to cuddle up to my own slow cooker without much success and if it weren't for tonight's modest triumph with a sausage and potato experiment, I might have abandoned the thing altogether. It truly is amazing how one can throw some quartered red potatoes, a diced onion, a few sausage links and a bit of veggie broth into a ceramic pot and come home to a dinner that's, more or less, completely prepared.
Of course, after nearly six years of blogging (six years!) I'm still wretched about remembering to take pictures of things. Trust me, though, it was actually kind of yummy and not at all the sort of shredded-meat-with-soft-carrots thing that I've well mastered and come to dread. Yes, I'd say the slow cooker thing is looking up.
Finding the blog was good timing since I have been trying hard to cuddle up to my own slow cooker without much success and if it weren't for tonight's modest triumph with a sausage and potato experiment, I might have abandoned the thing altogether. It truly is amazing how one can throw some quartered red potatoes, a diced onion, a few sausage links and a bit of veggie broth into a ceramic pot and come home to a dinner that's, more or less, completely prepared.
Of course, after nearly six years of blogging (six years!) I'm still wretched about remembering to take pictures of things. Trust me, though, it was actually kind of yummy and not at all the sort of shredded-meat-with-soft-carrots thing that I've well mastered and come to dread. Yes, I'd say the slow cooker thing is looking up.
Can Can Girl
New and experienced canners alike can be confused on the subject of gear. After all, newbies are new and the experienced among us can become hidebound by familiar methods. Home canning as we know it today hasn't been around so very long, after all, and it is just as influenced by science and technology as anything else. Methods change (witness new USDA recommendations for tomato processing times), as does fashion - you don't see much in the way of watermelon rind pickles these days but I get more hits for tomatilla salsa than anything else.
When someone asks me for recommendations for getting started with canning, I try to keep things simple and few in number. There are hacks and homespun ways to get around almost all of them, but I think that they're better accomplished by confident canners and do suggest that new enthusiasts stick to at least a minimal complement.
First: jars. I recommend Ball (or -type) canning jars. There are other varieties of jars but these are likely to be the most recognizable to those of us in the U.S. They are strong, will last for years with proper treatment (save a few losses here and there) and can also be used in the freezer. They take a two-part "dome" lid, the rings of which can be used over and over again (in fact, the you only need the rings to set the seal - once a jar is sealed you can take the ring off and store the jar without it, using the ring on the next jar to be processed).
For my money, the best canning kettle is one intended for canning. You can buy them with the rack included, and replacement racks are available. I've had my kettle for eight or nine years now and I'm ready to purchase a new rack. It is possible to use a spaghetti pot and wrap your jars in tea towels for cushioning but, even though I myself have done so (for quarter-pint jars) it's not the kind of thing that I think that newbies ought to do. If you already have a pot that will fit the rack dimensions, by all means spring for just the rack.
Then there are the little things, like a jar lifter, funnel, sterlizing rack, and magnetic lid lifter. Of all of these, I only bother with the jar lifter (although I often use folded towels instead) and funnel. The lifter is useful for righting tipped jars or fishing jars out of the kettle if the filled rack is too heavy to lift and a funnel is very good for filling jars without making a mess of the rims, which could interfere with the seal. A canning funnel is sized just right for Ball-type jars, too, and worth the expense in my opinion. The others...bah. Not worth it to me, but your mileage may vary. Once you have an idea of the kids of things you like to make, specialty stuff like cherry pitters and apple corers and food mills enter the picture. Hold off of these at the very beginning or borrow them unless you know for 100% certain you're going to want them and consume the products to which they contribute.
You can buy kits of various kinds that incorporate some or all of this gear. There are several online providers, as well, or you can check your old-timey hardware store. I routinely by lids at our locally-owned hardware place and I've been known to zip into the much-dreaded Wal-Mart in a pinch (although it seems to me that they are selling less in the way of reusable gear and more in the way of canning seasoning mixes). Several supermarkets in my area carry lids, rings and jars in their housewares aisles, too.
Like many hobbies, even practical ones, the start-up costs for canning aren't a trifle. I'm not sure I really save money through canning, although I'm pretty confident that I'm able to produce very high quality products for an excellent cost, not considering the intangibles of being able to deal with lots of homegrown or otherwise inexpensive produce. Since I use my jars for freezer storage, too, I think that helps me avoid food waste as well. Once people find out that you're canning, you will likely receive lots of jars - for some reason people have them in their basements a lot - and I've scored a few from Craig's List and FreeCycle. I buy lids all year 'round to avoid a large outlay in July through September - more of a psychological help than a real financial one.
If you're just starting out, it may be worth pitching in with friends for the gear and a few dozen jars and sharing the work of your first canning sessions. Sharing the work of chopping and boiling and mashing is a great way to learn and until you know if you'll be canning year 'round or wanting to produce a lot of your family's food in this way, you may as well go co-op on the equipment.
Next time, I'll make my website and book recommendations, and talk a bit about how to get one's hands on stuff to can.
When someone asks me for recommendations for getting started with canning, I try to keep things simple and few in number. There are hacks and homespun ways to get around almost all of them, but I think that they're better accomplished by confident canners and do suggest that new enthusiasts stick to at least a minimal complement.
First: jars. I recommend Ball (or -type) canning jars. There are other varieties of jars but these are likely to be the most recognizable to those of us in the U.S. They are strong, will last for years with proper treatment (save a few losses here and there) and can also be used in the freezer. They take a two-part "dome" lid, the rings of which can be used over and over again (in fact, the you only need the rings to set the seal - once a jar is sealed you can take the ring off and store the jar without it, using the ring on the next jar to be processed).
For my money, the best canning kettle is one intended for canning. You can buy them with the rack included, and replacement racks are available. I've had my kettle for eight or nine years now and I'm ready to purchase a new rack. It is possible to use a spaghetti pot and wrap your jars in tea towels for cushioning but, even though I myself have done so (for quarter-pint jars) it's not the kind of thing that I think that newbies ought to do. If you already have a pot that will fit the rack dimensions, by all means spring for just the rack.
Then there are the little things, like a jar lifter, funnel, sterlizing rack, and magnetic lid lifter. Of all of these, I only bother with the jar lifter (although I often use folded towels instead) and funnel. The lifter is useful for righting tipped jars or fishing jars out of the kettle if the filled rack is too heavy to lift and a funnel is very good for filling jars without making a mess of the rims, which could interfere with the seal. A canning funnel is sized just right for Ball-type jars, too, and worth the expense in my opinion. The others...bah. Not worth it to me, but your mileage may vary. Once you have an idea of the kids of things you like to make, specialty stuff like cherry pitters and apple corers and food mills enter the picture. Hold off of these at the very beginning or borrow them unless you know for 100% certain you're going to want them and consume the products to which they contribute.
You can buy kits of various kinds that incorporate some or all of this gear. There are several online providers, as well, or you can check your old-timey hardware store. I routinely by lids at our locally-owned hardware place and I've been known to zip into the much-dreaded Wal-Mart in a pinch (although it seems to me that they are selling less in the way of reusable gear and more in the way of canning seasoning mixes). Several supermarkets in my area carry lids, rings and jars in their housewares aisles, too.
Like many hobbies, even practical ones, the start-up costs for canning aren't a trifle. I'm not sure I really save money through canning, although I'm pretty confident that I'm able to produce very high quality products for an excellent cost, not considering the intangibles of being able to deal with lots of homegrown or otherwise inexpensive produce. Since I use my jars for freezer storage, too, I think that helps me avoid food waste as well. Once people find out that you're canning, you will likely receive lots of jars - for some reason people have them in their basements a lot - and I've scored a few from Craig's List and FreeCycle. I buy lids all year 'round to avoid a large outlay in July through September - more of a psychological help than a real financial one.
If you're just starting out, it may be worth pitching in with friends for the gear and a few dozen jars and sharing the work of your first canning sessions. Sharing the work of chopping and boiling and mashing is a great way to learn and until you know if you'll be canning year 'round or wanting to produce a lot of your family's food in this way, you may as well go co-op on the equipment.
Next time, I'll make my website and book recommendations, and talk a bit about how to get one's hands on stuff to can.
Now that the Christmas decorations are, more or less, put away for the next 11 months and we're all struggling to remember to write '08 on our checks, let's talk about resolutions. Not *my* resolutions, mind, but yours. You know, the ones that you actually made a few months back rather than those from just the other day (perhaps forgotten already) and which involved getting organized for this year's gardening and canning seasons. I know that there must be lots of these resolutions out there because I see the referrals which read along the lines of "is it too late to start a garden" (in August, in the northeast of the U.S.) or "making strawberry jam at home when strawberries out of season" (in October) or even "what canning equipment do I really need" (this one and its varients happen all the time). Now that the garden catalogs are starting to arrive - I don't know about you, but I find these infinitely more tempting than any pre-Christmas gifty catalogs - we've got a good time to talk about the whys and wherefores of the whole business.
Gardening and canning are, of course, two entirely separate activities although they have a significant overlap for some people. Then there are related topics like dehydrating and freezing and u-pick and subsets such as container gardening and vertical gardening and seed saving and on and on. So what I thought I'd do is sort of lay out my system, the equipment I use and how I organize things and then try and get a bit of a conversation going about your methods and maybe we can all share a bit and come away with more info than we started with. Sound good? I'm not an expert in these matters, but someone needs to go first and seeing as this is my blog it may as well be me.
I'll start with canning and other food preservation stuff, because for me this part drives the gardening (for others the reverse may be true). In the coming week I'll touch on canning equipment, garden prep and how I choose what to grow, and some of my favorite garden and canning hacks.
Freezing: Our regular old top-of-the-fridge freezer holds the day-to-day stuff like yeast, unflavored gelatin, meats I intend to use within two or so weeks, roasted garlic, and gallon ziplocks of corn kernals, green peppers and peas. Our stand-alone freezer keeps flours, farm- and bulk-purchased meats, some bulk baking supplies, broths, tea and coffee, and veggies frozen for the longer-term (green beans, bell peppers, peas, cut and sauteed mushrooms, among others).
In addition to the freezers themselves, I use (and reuse and reuse and...) a good number of ziplock-type freezer bags and glass canning jars (be sure to leave expansion room in the jars, otherwise they WILL crack). For the jars, a cleaned used flat lid can be used inside a ring - you never want to reuse a flat lid when canning but I routinely use them for freezing purposes where the seal isn't as important as just keeping air away from the food.
Freezer season starts in the spring, when I start to mash up strawberries for frozen puree. By the time strawberry season ends I try to have several quart bags of puree for muffins, waffles and smoothies. Then we move onto cherries, blueberries and raspberries - each of these can be individually frozen on a cookie sheet before sweeping into a freezer bag for storage. Cherries do well if you can pit them (a cherry pitter is one of my few specialty kitchen gear possessions) but it's not necessary.
By the time I'm well into fruits, veggie freezing begins. Shallots can be peeled and stored in a large Mason jar and trimmed snow peas are easy to freeze. Corn is sheared off the cob and frozen on a cookie sheet before storage in a gallon freezer bag (it's then a simple matter to pull a cup or two out of the bag for cornbread or chili or whatever) while other ears are quickly simmered and then cut in half for freezing on the cob (the kids love this), peppers are cored and sliced, green beans trimmed and cut. Hot peppers are sliced before freezing. Roasted eggplant puree, smooshed pumpkin and shredded zucchini round out the freezer storage.
Dryer: The dryer is a new addition to my food preservation repertoire, one that I'm rapidly coming to appreciate. This year we dried cherry and plum tomatoes, cherries and apples. They've been very useful for quick preparation (one appetizer I adore: dried cherry tomatoes rehydrated in warm balsalmic vinegar and skewered with slices of chorizo and cubes of manchego cheese - bliss!) and products I'm hoping to continue this year. It would be cool to experiment with dried corn and mushrooms, so they're on my list as well.
Canning: At the moment, I focus strictly on water bath processing. This method is suitable only for food products with an acidity sufficient to render them safe for storage, a concept that is constantly evolving as the natures of food items change along with our understanding of food-borne pathogens. I've written before about my approach to risk management in this area - some will not agree with my take on, say, tomatoes. I'm o.k. with that. Differing thoughts on risk management will result in differing canning lists, too.
I usually have three or four kinds of jam on hand (strawberry, blueberry, peach and mango are favorites), as well as crushed tomatoes and roasted tomato sauce. Pickles include dilly beans and carrots, marinated mushrooms, kosher dills, jalapenos and occasionally brussels sprouts. Then there are sauces and condiments: tomato and tomatillo salsa, jerk sauce for marinades, chocolate sauce and preserved lemons. Fruit products include applesauce, pear sauce, whole cherries and diced peaches.
This is about it in terms of that I try to "put up", as they used to say. Things are slow right now with only jerk and chocolate sauce and preserved lemons to pay attention to. Then there'll be a break for garden prep (which I'll cover in an upcoming post) before the strawberries come in, after which things move faster and faster until September and October when I'm a quivering mess of tomato- and apple-based canning stress.
No matter how busy I get, though, I don't seem to be able to make "enough" of anything. This time of year I look around on the shelves and realize that we're out of so much already - and I don't like it. My own resolution is to try and do more - to not crash out on the sofa after six consecutive nights of canning crushed tomatoes, to go for the seventh and eighth and ninth if I can and the tomatoes are available. I resolve to not sleep in on Saturday mornings in August when corn is abundant at the farm market, knowing that come February I'll want it for chili and cornbread to warm a long, dark night.
Gardening and canning are, of course, two entirely separate activities although they have a significant overlap for some people. Then there are related topics like dehydrating and freezing and u-pick and subsets such as container gardening and vertical gardening and seed saving and on and on. So what I thought I'd do is sort of lay out my system, the equipment I use and how I organize things and then try and get a bit of a conversation going about your methods and maybe we can all share a bit and come away with more info than we started with. Sound good? I'm not an expert in these matters, but someone needs to go first and seeing as this is my blog it may as well be me.
I'll start with canning and other food preservation stuff, because for me this part drives the gardening (for others the reverse may be true). In the coming week I'll touch on canning equipment, garden prep and how I choose what to grow, and some of my favorite garden and canning hacks.
Freezing: Our regular old top-of-the-fridge freezer holds the day-to-day stuff like yeast, unflavored gelatin, meats I intend to use within two or so weeks, roasted garlic, and gallon ziplocks of corn kernals, green peppers and peas. Our stand-alone freezer keeps flours, farm- and bulk-purchased meats, some bulk baking supplies, broths, tea and coffee, and veggies frozen for the longer-term (green beans, bell peppers, peas, cut and sauteed mushrooms, among others).
In addition to the freezers themselves, I use (and reuse and reuse and...) a good number of ziplock-type freezer bags and glass canning jars (be sure to leave expansion room in the jars, otherwise they WILL crack). For the jars, a cleaned used flat lid can be used inside a ring - you never want to reuse a flat lid when canning but I routinely use them for freezing purposes where the seal isn't as important as just keeping air away from the food.
Freezer season starts in the spring, when I start to mash up strawberries for frozen puree. By the time strawberry season ends I try to have several quart bags of puree for muffins, waffles and smoothies. Then we move onto cherries, blueberries and raspberries - each of these can be individually frozen on a cookie sheet before sweeping into a freezer bag for storage. Cherries do well if you can pit them (a cherry pitter is one of my few specialty kitchen gear possessions) but it's not necessary.
By the time I'm well into fruits, veggie freezing begins. Shallots can be peeled and stored in a large Mason jar and trimmed snow peas are easy to freeze. Corn is sheared off the cob and frozen on a cookie sheet before storage in a gallon freezer bag (it's then a simple matter to pull a cup or two out of the bag for cornbread or chili or whatever) while other ears are quickly simmered and then cut in half for freezing on the cob (the kids love this), peppers are cored and sliced, green beans trimmed and cut. Hot peppers are sliced before freezing. Roasted eggplant puree, smooshed pumpkin and shredded zucchini round out the freezer storage.
Dryer: The dryer is a new addition to my food preservation repertoire, one that I'm rapidly coming to appreciate. This year we dried cherry and plum tomatoes, cherries and apples. They've been very useful for quick preparation (one appetizer I adore: dried cherry tomatoes rehydrated in warm balsalmic vinegar and skewered with slices of chorizo and cubes of manchego cheese - bliss!) and products I'm hoping to continue this year. It would be cool to experiment with dried corn and mushrooms, so they're on my list as well.
Canning: At the moment, I focus strictly on water bath processing. This method is suitable only for food products with an acidity sufficient to render them safe for storage, a concept that is constantly evolving as the natures of food items change along with our understanding of food-borne pathogens. I've written before about my approach to risk management in this area - some will not agree with my take on, say, tomatoes. I'm o.k. with that. Differing thoughts on risk management will result in differing canning lists, too.
I usually have three or four kinds of jam on hand (strawberry, blueberry, peach and mango are favorites), as well as crushed tomatoes and roasted tomato sauce. Pickles include dilly beans and carrots, marinated mushrooms, kosher dills, jalapenos and occasionally brussels sprouts. Then there are sauces and condiments: tomato and tomatillo salsa, jerk sauce for marinades, chocolate sauce and preserved lemons. Fruit products include applesauce, pear sauce, whole cherries and diced peaches.
This is about it in terms of that I try to "put up", as they used to say. Things are slow right now with only jerk and chocolate sauce and preserved lemons to pay attention to. Then there'll be a break for garden prep (which I'll cover in an upcoming post) before the strawberries come in, after which things move faster and faster until September and October when I'm a quivering mess of tomato- and apple-based canning stress.
No matter how busy I get, though, I don't seem to be able to make "enough" of anything. This time of year I look around on the shelves and realize that we're out of so much already - and I don't like it. My own resolution is to try and do more - to not crash out on the sofa after six consecutive nights of canning crushed tomatoes, to go for the seventh and eighth and ninth if I can and the tomatoes are available. I resolve to not sleep in on Saturday mornings in August when corn is abundant at the farm market, knowing that come February I'll want it for chili and cornbread to warm a long, dark night.
Happy New Year, Internet friends. I hope that 2008 brings us all health and peace most of all. A few smiles, too, of course but mostly health and peace.
I spent yesterday, the final day of 2007, doing more or less two things. I turned 39 years old and I attended my grandmother's wedding.
My grandmother's first wedding took place when she was seventeen years old and the celebration was enabled in good part by the pooling of ration coupons amongst friends and her intended's eight older siblings. My mother was born within a year while her father was, as they said at the time, somewhere in Europe. She'd be nearly three years old before he father came home and the newlyweds would be together again.
I was a child when my grandfather died and I'd be surprised if my youngest sister has any memories of him at all. For most of my life, my grandmother insisted she would never remarry, that she liked her independence and hard-won ability to look after herself. There would be a few gentlemen friends to squire her to the movies or to the diner for supper, and the occasional fancy dress reunion of this or that warship but in the main she was on her own and abundantly available to her four children, eleven grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
And then she met (on a blind date) a man she not only would consent to marry, but offer her consent with such an alacrity that fairly shocked the entire family. Shocked we may have been, but we were all there present and quite literally cheering her on.
Very shortly after the ceremony the groom's son bundled up his young daughter and prepared to hurry back to his wife, who was too close to giving birth to travel safely or comfortably. He'd received a call that her contractions had begun in earnest and predicted that perhaps the time was near. With this is mind I shared with my grandmother and her new husband at my own leave-taking, some hours later, my realization that they would soon be jointly the grandparents of thirteen grandchildren ranging in age from infancy to 39.
Today I tried to explain to the Boy that very few children get to attend their great-grandmother's wedding, a notion that he of course couldn't quite grasp. I went on to tell him how lucky we are that she is so healthy and active and independent. "But Mommy," he said, "She's very pretty and not very old at all. Why wouldn't she be active?" His sister chimed in with the conviction that the bride must really be a princess and I saw that it must be true what is sometimes said about the very old and the very young, that the circle of age comes 'round on itself so that those who are truly left out of an understanding of life and love are those in the middle. The 39 year olds, for example.
I spent yesterday, the final day of 2007, doing more or less two things. I turned 39 years old and I attended my grandmother's wedding.
My grandmother's first wedding took place when she was seventeen years old and the celebration was enabled in good part by the pooling of ration coupons amongst friends and her intended's eight older siblings. My mother was born within a year while her father was, as they said at the time, somewhere in Europe. She'd be nearly three years old before he father came home and the newlyweds would be together again.
I was a child when my grandfather died and I'd be surprised if my youngest sister has any memories of him at all. For most of my life, my grandmother insisted she would never remarry, that she liked her independence and hard-won ability to look after herself. There would be a few gentlemen friends to squire her to the movies or to the diner for supper, and the occasional fancy dress reunion of this or that warship but in the main she was on her own and abundantly available to her four children, eleven grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
And then she met (on a blind date) a man she not only would consent to marry, but offer her consent with such an alacrity that fairly shocked the entire family. Shocked we may have been, but we were all there present and quite literally cheering her on.
Very shortly after the ceremony the groom's son bundled up his young daughter and prepared to hurry back to his wife, who was too close to giving birth to travel safely or comfortably. He'd received a call that her contractions had begun in earnest and predicted that perhaps the time was near. With this is mind I shared with my grandmother and her new husband at my own leave-taking, some hours later, my realization that they would soon be jointly the grandparents of thirteen grandchildren ranging in age from infancy to 39.
Today I tried to explain to the Boy that very few children get to attend their great-grandmother's wedding, a notion that he of course couldn't quite grasp. I went on to tell him how lucky we are that she is so healthy and active and independent. "But Mommy," he said, "She's very pretty and not very old at all. Why wouldn't she be active?" His sister chimed in with the conviction that the bride must really be a princess and I saw that it must be true what is sometimes said about the very old and the very young, that the circle of age comes 'round on itself so that those who are truly left out of an understanding of life and love are those in the middle. The 39 year olds, for example.
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