Preserving What We Have

 

Awwwww, September is here and along with it, the busy work that comes with having a large garden you wish to squeeze every bit it has to offer from.  At least that is how things are working out here at our home.  This year I am more determined than ever to can, dry, freeze, roast or ferment anything I can to keep it around longer.  Robby has been a huge help in this area because during the week when I am at my job, if it is raining and he can be outside getting work done, he will do some canning for us.  So far, he has canned our beans, spaghetti sauce, tomato juice and hot peppers. 

I have canned blackberry jam and concord grape jam.  I have also been slow oven roasting the tomatoes as I harvest them from the garden and put them in jars covered in olive oil to keep in the fridge.  They are so delicious!!!!!  I also have been making a lot of pesto with our basil and either freezing it in ice cube trays or filling 1/2 pint jars and freezing it.  I also made some Tomato Almond Pesto for a change and froze that in the ice cube trays too.  I found that recipe here at  Smitten Kitchen and highly recommend it.

I have always grown herbs in my garden but for whatever bizarre reason, I have never dried them at the end of the summer.  Not this year though, I have hung rosemary, thyme and oregano to dry and have frozen parsley and chives.  Next year I hope to have more variety of herbs to grow and later preserve.  I will continue to cut more branches of herbs as groups dry and hang them, but my space is limited as to where I can hang them so I must do them in batches.  Besides, I don't want to cut them all now and then not have anymore fresh herbs for the rest of the growing season.

Our root cellar is completed and as of now, all we have in it is our potatoes and garlic.  Our onions are still curing but will be added soon.  We have turnips planted and a second planting of beets that will be ready to dig in a few weeks that will also be put in the cellar.  I planted carrots again, but hold out little hope of them actually growing into anything worth harvesting.  I just can't seem to grow carrots to save my soul. Oh yeah, a friend of ours gave us a bunch of sweet potato plants and we still have those to harvest and place in the cellar.  I am anxious to see how the root cellar works this winter.  I am not going to lie, even though there is a light inside and a door, it still sort of freaks me out when I go into it.  I usually make Robby go with me but hope in time I will get over this silly fear of something I wanted so desperately.  Robby swears animals can't get inside of it, but I have seen these pesky little country critters get into just about anything they want, and I would imagine a dark cellar filled with yummy food would be a perfect place for them to want to hang out.  Once we get the root cellar full for the winter, I will take a picture to share and post a story about the construction of it.



Herbs to dry and to freeze



Our kitchen table is rarely cleared off enough to eat on this time of year.
It makes a great work station for prepping foods to preserve.





Classic Pesto placed in ice cube trays to freeze.

 

I think this looks more like ground meat in ice cube trays but in reality it is the
Tomato-Almond Pesto and it is delicious!

The aromas in my kitchen while all of this work goes on, is amazing.
It might look like a complete mess, but it is a fragrant mess!

My trusty Cuisinart.
I have had her a long time but she just keeps plugging along.

One of the things I love the most about living where we live and the friends that I have here, is that we all believe in bartering and trading.  Robby is a retired contractor and many times we have friends that call and ask for him to help with a project they want done.  This past winter, two of our closest friends, who were expecting their first child in a few months, were needing to renovate their kitchen.  They asked Robby for some help and direction and Robby was more than happy to help out.  January and February are his two least favorite months as hunting season is over and the weather can be too cold to get much done outside.  Jason is a cattle farmer and his wife Harrigan is one the most amazing young women I have ever met.  She has taught me so much about so many different things and she is 18 years younger than me, how is she so wise?  She puts me to shame with the preserving, fermenting, home baking and cooking she does.  And now she has also added amazing mother to her list of accomplishments.  Anyway, we agreed that for payment on the kitchen renovation, Jason would give us one of his steer and pay for the processing at our local slaughter house which is just up the road.  We would have our freezer filled with beef for the winter and they would have a beautiful new kitchen, sounded great to me!  This past weekend, the beef was ready for us to pick up and oh my goodness, do we ever have a freezer full of beef?  Good thing I have 4 sons who come home to eat and one who now lives on his own so I can help him keep his freezer full too.

We filled this extra freezer full and had a bit more to add into our other extra freezer in the house.  I turned the page on my calendar this month and to my surprise the verb for the month of September is BARTER.  I love it!!!!!!!  Harrigan and I did a much smaller scale of bartering recently.  She showed up at my house with this huge pan filled with concord grapes she had just picked from her husband's family's grape vines.  These vines have been around for about 4 generations.  I was floored and so appreciative.  In exchange for my grapes, I sent her home with fresh figs from my fig tree.  They had just started ripening and I was happy to share with her.



10 pounds of freshly picked Concord Grapes

These are my figs, clearly not ripe in this photo, but you get the idea.


So since I had these 10 pounds of delicious grapes staring me down, I needed to figure out what to do with them and fast.  So I looked up a great recipe for Concord Jam and got to it.



The finished product.

Yep, things have been busy around here on the weekends and it seems like before I know it, the week is starting back up.  I go off to work with my 16, two year olds everyday and come home too tired to hardly fix dinner.  It's nice to know there is so much in the pantry that I can just grab and easily transform into dinner or be able to still go out to the garden and pick our dinner.  I wish I could just spend every day doing what I do on the weekends, but in the mean time, I will cherish each and every opportunity I have to work on my sustainable lifestyle and improve upon it.  Winter will be here before we know it, and all this hard work will pay off.

Until those cold days settle in, enjoy your last days of Summer and try and find a way to make them last into the next few seasons.