Cherries!

Last weekend we made cherry jam. We had several pounds of cherries to work with. I am not exactly sure how many. We had originally picked sixteen pounds of cherries (to give you an idea of quantity - this completely filled our fruit drawer), but several pounds were eaten before we got to the jam-making stage. We like our cherries!

This year I finally broke down and purchased a food mill. So many people kept telling me that I should get one. We had borrowed one before, and it was great and saved lots of time, but I never really thought I needed one until I was staring down pounds and pounds of cherries and blueberries (we had also picked 11 pounds of blueberries on our outing - those I made into freezer jam for convenience).

My daughter, who has had a keen interest in cooking shows for several years, jumped all over the food mill. I think the only thing that I was allowed to do with it was clean it.

Our new food mill.

Unfortunately, I did not realize that it didn't pit the cherries, so that was A PROBLEM. Do you know how few stores in rural areas sell cherry pitters? We do. That was several hours on a Saturday morning. We eventually found a swiss-army kitchen tool thing (below) that pits cherries, cores apples, does something to strawberries and also zests things and I don't even know what else. It actually worked quite well.

The swiss army kitchen tool.

Colleen and I had quite the system going - she would use the food mill to process the cherries after I cleaned and pitted them. Then we got them cooking and canned. So blueberries and cherries are done, now we get to move on to the raspberries and blackberries.

Jars of cherry jam.

A New (for us) Recipe: Blackberry Blueberry Jam

Happy 4th of July everyone! Americans anyway. I guess to anyone else, Happy Monday that happens to be the 4th of July!

So, the fruit started rolling in back in June with the strawberries. With the wet, soggy, grey spring that we had, our strawberry crop was just enough for my breakfast and lunches. I can go through a pound of strawberries a day by myself when they are fresh-from-our-bushes-picked berries. Mmmm, Vitamin C! Sadly, cherry season was super short due to the spring that we had, and we missed out on going to our local orchard to pick those (super bummed, as those are my all-time favorite fruit, but I am working on getting my husband to plant us our own cherry trees. We'll see if I get those or the dishwasher first...)

So now we are on to blueberries and blackberries. Our blueberries are a later variety, so it will be a few more weeks until they are ripe, but Colleen and I did go up the road this weekend and pick their early variety. Our blackberries are doing really well this year! We've been getting a 2-4 pints a day. And they are super, super sweet!

Blueberries that we picked locally, and our blackberries.

It was a rainy day, so a good one to be in the kitchen making jam. We made a batch of just blackberry jam, and I had to adjust the next recipe and cut waaaay down on the sugar, because the first jam was so sweet. (Those berries are sweet!) Ice cream topping anyone?

Several years ago, my mom bought me the "Farm Journal's Freezing and Canning Cookbook." I LOVE this book! It has so many recipes, and combinations that I would never think of, such as blackberry and blueberry jam (other people may think of these things, which I am sure you can look up on the internet now, but when you are busy picking and picking and weeding and feeding animals and also have a fractured foot, it is easier sometimes to just be able to flip through a book and have a the recipes right at your fingertips). It also has recipes for green tomatoes, pickled everything (even fruit!) and meats. The other thing that I really like about this book is that the recipes are for large quantities of fruit, such as pounds and bushels (which is what we tend to have around here) rather than cups and pints (which is generally what I find when I look online, although not always). So, if you are going to seriously get into canning, I would recommend that you look for a copy of this book.

Blackberry-bluberry jam - final product!

Month in Review

It's been a little while since I've posted anything.  Which is not to say that we haven't been busy; anyone who harvests produce will understand that this is a busy time of year.  Also the concussion didn't help (one of my corgis thinks he is a ninja and thought it would be fun to practice on me).  I had all these ideas for posts, but instead this will have to be a mish-mash.

To make up for the strawberry harvest (which was abysmal with all the spring rain), we had a wonderful raspberry and blackberry crop this year.  Since raspberry/blackberry jam is my favorite jam, I really didn't mind so much.

Raspberry/blackberry jam

I also had a humbling experience.  With everything going on (health issues, dealing with all the produce coming in, keeping up with the goats, going to my day job, etc.) I can feel very overwhelmed sometimes.  Then people come along and do the completely unexpected.  I was working with my daughter and her 4H projects, and we were at one of the leader's houses finishing up a project and talking about things.  I happened to notice that they had one of the magnetic knife strips above their sink and asked about it (I have always thought they were really awesome and wanted to get one).  Next thing I know, one of their daughters goes into a closet and hands me one.  I had no words, but am very grateful and happy.

My new knife holder.  My husband says it looks intimidating, since it is now one of the first things you see when you come into our kitchen.

In that same week, friends of ours gave me another gift: a lovely goat bag, upcycled from a feed bag, with some dairy-free cookies in it (I made sure to hide those so that I actually got to eat them. They were tasty).  The bag has been used several times since.


My new grocery/stuff bag

 

It is wonderful to have people like this in my life.  One does not need to have lots of friends, at least I don't.  I would rather have a few friends that I know I can count on than lots of friends who are going to leave when things get bad.

Okay, moving on.  So, now that the weather seems to (finally!) be getting cooler, our pumpkins are coming in.  Everyone seems to think this is too early, but one cannot argue with produce.  Also, I love pumpkin anything, so I am not going to complain.  The plan was to have some pumpkin for eating now and some to freeze.  However, the first batch came in for labor day and we already ate all of it.  I'm not sure that anything will make it to the freezer from the remaining pumpkins.  I made a lovely pumpkin bar/cake thing and a pumpkin pie (that's right, we had pumpkin pie for labor day and it was awesome).  We are already discussing dedicating an entire (new) garden just to pumpkins next year.  And this is how we end up with so many gardens.


Pumpkin bars

And this morning we had an unexpected visitor.  We live in an area with a local hot air balloon company, and they frequently fly over our house.  It still surprises me every time, although it is just normal to my daughter.  They were flying over this morning.  Even the goats were stopping to look.

The hot air balloon flying over this morning

I tried to get a picture of the goats all looking at the hot air balloon, but of course they all turned to look at me instead. I must work on my sneaking skills.  I guess it would help if I didn't have a squeaky front porch door to contend with.

The goats, turning from the hot air balloon to look at me

Crisp Squash Pickles

Canning season has begun!  Every winter we plan and dream about our gardens (we plant several) and they never quite end up how we planned, but that doesn't matter.  For some reason, we seem to be able to grow cantaloupes and watermelons in the dozens, but have trouble with "easy" veggies like tomatoes and zucchini.  So this year we planted an entire row of zucchini and an unfathomable number of tomato plants.  This approach seems to have worked for us, because we now have lots of green tomatoes and pounds and pounds of zucchini.

After rejoicing in the quantity of zucchini (I am less thrilled about the tomatoes, as I can no longer eat as many as I would like due to serious heartburn issues), I picked seven or so.  And there are still so many left growing!  Every time I picked one of the large ones, it seemed like there was a smaller one hiding under the leaves nearby.  It's nice that all the rain is helping with something, since it did not help our strawberry crop this year.

So, with the help of my food processor, I made four loaves of zucchini bread.  The first two will be gone by the end of the week.  The other two I froze before they get devoured. 

I then went to a book my mother purchased for me some years ago: the Farm Journal's Freezing and Canning Cookbook.  If you have a large amount of any kind of produce to deal with, or are looking for some new and interesting ways of mixing produce I highly recommend it.  Each year we try out some new recipes.  A few years ago we did Lime Pear jam.  Last year we tried Pickled Green Beans.  With all the zucchini I thought I would try Crisp Squash Pickles.

The recipe calls for 5 lbs of zucchini.  Having recently purchased a small digital scale, I had a geek moment when I measured out my zucchini, getting just the right combination of squash to equal (almost) 5 lbs.  Here is what 5.1 lbs of zucchini looks like:

I then went back to the food processor (I love that thing!) to make the slices:

From there I simply followed the recipe.  The final product looks pretty good.