Freezing Eggplant Parmesan & Other Preserving

This worked well last winter and it is a nice convenience food for a quick meal. To use the frozen slices, place them on a baking pan in a hot (400-425F?) to crisp/thaw them for a few minutes. Add a dab of sauce and grated mozzarella and broil.

 Lightly salt the sliced eggplant and let it sit in a colander to drain for about half an hour.

 Dip each slice in egg and bread crumbs (we like panko style crumbs).

 Fry in oil.

 Cool on paper towel and pat oil from the top as well.

 Stack in layers separated by parchment paper.

Wrap in foil, label, and place flat in the freezer.

Three large eggplants took two hours (including draining time) to prepare and made 2-3 meals (plus my lunch) for our family.

I also used our produce to put together our 4th quart of lactofermented pickles, grated other eggplants for dinner tomorrow, and made ground beef/onion/pepper(Anaheim and Poblano)/garlic/kale enchilada filling for tonight's dinner and for freezing. It feels good to start squirreling food away for the winter. 

This recipe was my jumping off place. I quit using the grape leaves and haven't noticed a difference. We've been using a couple cloves of garlic, a few peppercorns, some dill head, and some prepared horseradish (Thanks Aunt Debbie and Brad!) in with the cucumber slices in the brine. Horseradish does seem to be the magic ingredient. I'm looking forward to some jalapenos ripening so we can try that too.

Wrap the filling in corn tortillas with some shredded cheese, pour enchilada sauce over the pan (we like Nanita's), sprinkle with more cheese and bake until hot and cheese is starting to crust. With the filling already made and frozen, it becomes a pretty quick meal.

Preserving Season 2013

I was surprised but not surprised when I noticed that it has been exactly a month since I posted an update. It has been that frenetic end of summer harvesting/preserving chaos. Even out of our relatively modest garden, we have gotten an amazing amount of bounty this year. Our tomato plants (7 Roma and 2 cherry) have produced well over 100lbs. by my best reckoning. The pepper plants (5 green bell, 1 ancho, and 1 jalapeno) were covered.

The preserving was made more extensive when a Facebook friend posted this link (Can-o-Rama 2013 from Northwest Edible) to my wall with a note about "don't you wish you had the time to do this". What she doesn't realize is that for people with my disorder (if only it had a name...) just make up the time and this post ended up having three dangerous links. One, I ended up using her "almost free tomato sauce idea" to make food out of the tomato skins that I've always wasted when I can diced tomatoes every year. Two, she linked to a dill pickle relish recipe only a day after I'd been wishing I knew of a reliable one. Three, and most deadly, she introduced me to a book - Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan. I went out and bought the book and immediately discovered it has 15 canning recipes that are on my must try list. This is not practical but again, my disorder compelled me, although physical amounts of time have somewhat tempered the damage. I went totally crazy, including a day of cleaning frozen berries and fruit out of the freezer to make things I wanted to try. So far cantaloupe vanilla jam (surprisingly delicious), strawberry vanilla jam, cranberry syrup, rhubarb syrup, ketchup, and roasted corn salsa have been attempted. They are all really really good. Everybody, please go out and get this book then make your own ketchup. Seriously, I don't think we can go back to store bought now. This book, and the blog it is a companion to, are truly delightful.

Canning yielded 

• 18 qts. dill pickles
• 14 qts. diced tomatoes (hopefully 7 more this week) 
• 14 pts. roasted corn salsa
• 6 pts. strawberry vanilla jam
• 5 pts. ketchup
• 6 half-pts. dill pickle relish
• 1+ pt. cantaloupe vanilla jam
• 1+ pt. cranberry syrup
• about 1c. of rhubarb syrup

(All cucumbers, tomatoes, green and hot peppers, onions, and cantaloupe were from the garden. Everything else was from the freezer or purchased.)

Unpreserved, there are/were 6 pumpkins, 7 individual cantaloupe, 4 watermelon, 2 eggplants, and about 2lbs. of carrots. 

Frozen, there are two gallon bags of diced beets, one gallon of broccoli, one gallon of edamame beans, 24 oz. of tomato sauce, and marinara sauce (15 pints and 7 "pizza portions").

Quentin bought me these. I tried them on the strawberry vanilla jam and only had 2 of 5 seal. I'm going to have to do some reading up on tricks people have for being successful.

Cranberry syrup is yummy in sparkling water and in vodka drinks. I wish it was a little tarter though. Less sugar next time.

There was a bag of frozen bananas that had been there long enough that they had to be used. The day before my freezer clean out, I had dead bananas on the counter, found a muffin recipe, made it, loved it, then realized that I hadn't really followed it. I'd forgotten the egg, replaced the butter with applesauce, decreased the sugar, added more banana and decreased the flour. Heehee. I wrote down "my" recipe and made three dozen muffins with the freezer bananas, froze 2 dozen and we ate 1 dozen fresh.

"My" recipe, which yields about 18 muffins, is below, bake at 350 for 18-22ish minutes.

4 very ripe mashed bananas

1/3 c applesauce

1/4 c brown sugar

1/4 c white sugar

1/2 t salt

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1 1/2 c flour

Willow helped all day one day, building long trains and tall towers of blocks and rearranging pumpkins. For some reason she believed that a pumpkin needed to sit squarely in the middle of each doorway. Wish I knew what goes through her head.

Odds and Ends

Yep, thanks to the fact mom comes down each day, I had time to make 4 quarts of pickles with cucumbers from the garden today. There should be enough more ready in a couple of days to make another few jars. We absolutely loved the pickles from the recipe I used last time so we're having them again. I can't believe that was four years ago. This time I think we'll end up with fewer jars and more people to share them with so maybe I can start making pickles yearly. I really like doing it. It's so easy and assembling the jars always feels kind of artistic. One of the many benefits of now living close to family is being able to can as much as I want and know I can probably fob the results off on people as gifts, especially since I despise feeding the consumerism that runs rampant around the holidays.

I'm feeling very foolish that I didn't think to plant dill. Next year, next year...

So, having a toddler is awesome. Everybody must get tired of hearing that, but it is. I love her earnest concentration and the way her diapered butt wiggles as she purposefully dashes toward her next job. She sets and clears the table. She shells peas and shucks corn. She puts dirty clothes in the laundry basket and helps "fold" clean clothes (also known as piling them in a heap, topped off by an emphatic pat).  Clarity has diapers and pacifiers fetched for her and gets copious big sister kisses, hugs and pats. She intensely watches and attempts to learn how to do every job and feeling like she's making meaningful contributions is the highlight of her day.

Her play is just as serious. For the last couple of days, she will spend a solid half hour at a time silently absorbed in scribbling with crayons on paper. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her with the phone book on her lap and "reads" to herself until I come to check on her because it's gotten so quiet. Today, she finally started being able to string her beads onto their lace with no help but until now she has spent the last week transferring them from cup to bag to box to couch cushion to cup to...

The best part is the way she will just look up at you in the middle of a task with a huge grin and laughing eyes. "Isn't this the greatest thing ever?"

Once more, toddlers are so incredibly cool.

This weekend was Quentin's grandma's 90th birthday and was the first time all the cousins were together. Q's got pictures of the rest of the family to post. I just took pictures of the kiddos. Cousin Cooper is only 7 weeks older than Clarity but she's so tiny compared to him!

And, finally, Ms. C just keeps clicking along. She only gained 2 oz. in the last week instead of the expected 8-16 oz. so we'll have to talk about that with the doctor on Friday. I'm guessing we'll probably put her on to 24 cal. milk (currently, it's supplemented up to 22 cal/oz) and maybe look at increasing the volume a little through the use of a couple of larger continuous night time feeds. She's doing wonderfully on her oxygen though and gets occupational therapy twice a week. We're working really hard on feeding and I feel like we're slowly gaining a little ground.

Stocking up

So, admittedly, we don't grow most of our food (although we tend to grow more than most people do) but I really really try to avoid buying produce at the grocery store so, when I can, I try to stock up from local farms during the summer.

Some of the ways we do that are...

Buying bell peppers at the farm when they're 5 for $1 (!) and dicing and freezing them for use all winter. We also do this with onions and broccoli and green beans. We freeze our own edamame and corn. It's just like having the grocery store freezer section in your own home and have you looked at the price of quality frozen vegetables?!

We also buy and can peaches, cherries, and apples in season but freezing vegetables and berries preserves more taste and nutrition. Canning vegetables is also a much more involved process.

We pulled 20 lbs. of tomatoes out of the garden on Monday and simmered them down into a delicious marinara with some homegrown basil, oregano and garlic and farmer grown onion. Q cooked some Italian sausage and we had it over white sweet potatoes last night. It was so good and hearty that I ate the leftover sausage sauce all by itself after my potato was gone. The back left burner also has a chicken carcass getting transformed into stock for winter cooking. Heehee, the pun with the title was totally unintentional but I suppose we really are "stocking up". :)

What I would do with two free hands...

It's lucky she's so cute because there is a lot of work around here that isn't getting done (or done veeeery slowly) because of her. As sweet as these newborn days are I'm hoping she'll start being able to nap in the crib in a couple of weeks rather than in the sling on my chest.

Q has taken on the Whole 30 Challenge with a bunch of people at his gym so I'm counting down the days until October 12. I feel very guilty about continuing to eat several things that he's abstaining from right now - grains, dairy and the occasional sweetened anything being the major ones. There are benefits though -

1)We're eating way more veggies than usual and I'm surprised by how many meals don't really need the grain that they're usually served with. Tacos are fantastic wrapped in iceberg lettuce instead of tortillas. A vegetable and chicken curry is just a delicious thick stew without rice beneath it (although we were careful to not make the flavors strong enough to be overwhelming when it's not cut by rice). Especially since grain growing and processing is so labor intensive it's nice to seriously look at how much of them we really need to eat.

2) Q's been doing most of the cooking - and he's a fantastic cook!

Here's the braised cabbage with pan-fried chicken-apple sausage that was dinner on Saturday. Every woman should marry a man who can cook. He's even been feeding me "birdie bites" when I'm nursing Willow and don't have hands and things just smell *too good*.

Amusingly, most of the stuff we seem to be harvesting lately is not on his current diet. Last week's marinara and curry were made with almost exclusively homegrown ingredients (have I mentioned the pound of garlic we harvested?) but the big crops we planted that are just coming on now are currently forbidden - edamame, potatoes, corn, and oats. The edamame is in the freezer and the oats are still waiting to be threshed and winnowed.

Q dug out the two little potato patches I planted on a whim this spring when some rotten potatoes started sprouting in the compost bin. Ten pounds isn't bad for a crop that had no financial outlay and about an hour of time put into it.
We packed them in a paper bag with alternating layers of straw and potatoes. After the main crush of summer produce is done I'm going to try to fit the bag into the fridge since we still don't possess a location with appropriate root cellar conditions.

I started making a dent (literally) in the corn "field" today.
After I strip off the ears, the stalks get chopped off at the base. I'm cutting them into 4-5' lengths and have been setting them under the canopy to dry out.
They're sitting on the large pile of oat straw I put under cover a couple of days ago when it started looking rainy. When the stalks have dried thoroughly the current plan is to send them through a chipper for composting or path mulch.

I got about an eighth of the bed done today and got 30 ears (not including the little unripe ones that went to the grateful chickens). 8 x 30 = a whole lot of ears of corn, especially since Q can't eat any of it fresh this year. Normally, I'd be worried that over 200 ears wouldn't be enough to fulfill his seasonal sweet corn appetite. As it is, the neighbors got a dozen of the prettiest ears I found and the rest of today's pick got blanched, cut from the cobs, and frozen for winter.
There's a lot of this stuff where I feel like we're working against the clock because Q goes back to work next week and the little that has been done is because we're taking turns on baby duty. Of course, one way or another it will all get done to some level and it will all work out. After all, there isn't really an alternative. If the big jobs get done, all I'll be left with is the regular tomato pickings and small batch marinara making and freezing, which can be done with a baby tied to my chest.

Green peppers were on sale at the farm this weekend so we got 1/2 gallon of diced peppers into the freezer. Tomorrow is canning diced tomatoes with a friend. Saturday (Willow's one month birthday) will be apple picking and applesauce making. I'm so grateful that Q's such a willing helper and participant so we'll be able to eat locally and well this winter.

The Humble Baked Beans

Poor beans! They're so much less photogenic than glowing orange peaches or juicy red cherries. They are, however, the carriers of protein and, until now, have been one of the very few things I buy canned, largely because Q has a little beans on toast obsession.

When I came across a canned baked beans recipe on the National Center for Home Food Preservation site it seemed like a good experiment. Unfortunately, the recipe as written should be titled "White Beans in Vaguely Brown Water". It had almost no flavor so after they'd finished their oven time and I was convinced that the recipe was a dud, we doctored them before proceeding to the canning steps.

Here's the ingredients I would follow from the beginning next time (instructions for preparation are in the link above).

3 lbs. white beans (made about 10 pints of beans)

Reserve all of the cooking liquid. To 1 qt. of the liquid add...

1/2 c molasses

1/4 c apple cider vinegar

1/4 c ketchup

3 T mustard

3 T salt

Mix this in with the cooked beans and 2 strips of bacon cut into 1" lengths. Place the mixture in your baking dish and add additional reserved liquid until the beans are covered. I did give them a stir and add a little more liquid every hour and I would definitely only bake them for 4 hours. I did them for 5 and they seem just about right but I fear that the canning process pushed them over the edge to mushy.

Q's been having beans as part of his breakfast for the last couple of days and enjoying them. The first attempt was definitely successful enough to try version 2.0 next time we need beans.

Berry and Cherry Preserving

I've been rather busy preserving this spring. We ran out of jam this winter so I needed to stock up. We've also discovered that 1/2c of dried cherries thrown in with the oatmeal to cook in the mornings is delicious with a little cinnamon and nutmeg and it sounds like a fantastic winter treat. I loved last year's cherry pie filling so much that I've done one batch and I have another 10 pounds that are going to get processed tomorrow.

Here's my list so far so I won't forget what I did...

Dried Cherries

Slightly less than 3 quarts were made with 12 pounds of sweet cherries, pitted, halved and soaked in a citric acid bath (2T + 1 gal cool water). I heated a honey dip (1c honey + 3c water) to boiling then removed it from the heat. The cherries were dipped into the bath in two batches for 2 min. each. They were then dried in the dehydrator for 18 hours.

Cherry Pie Filling

I use this recipe but 1o pounds of sour cherries becomes 5 quarts, so I have to adjust the amounts. For 5 qts. cherries, I use 6c sugar, 1 1/2c Clear Jel, 7 3/4c water, 6T+2t lemon juice and just under 1t cinnamon and 2t almond extract. This much makes just under 6 quarts of filling.

Cherry Jam

4c pitted and chopped sweet cherries, 1/4c lemon juice, 5 c sugar, 1 pkg Sure Jell pectin

Strawberry Honey Jam

4 pounds strawberries, 2c honey, and 1 pkg Sure Jell Low or No Sugar Pectin

This jam set up well, only slightly runnier than "normal" strawberry jam.

Strawberry Rhubarb Honey Jam

3 pounds strawberries, 1 pound rhubarb, 4c honey, and 1 pkg Sure Jell Low or No Sugar Pectin

The rhubarb seemed to give good body to this jam and it seems to behave like its full sugar counterpart.

Blueberry Honey Jam

3 1/2 pounds blueberries, 4 1/2c honey, and 1 pkg Sure Jell Low or No Sugar Pectin

This one started out tasting overly strongly of honey to begin with but after about 2 days, blueberry became the predominant flavor.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jelly - Cooking with Honey I

We have a new crop of rhubarb coming in and I needed to use the rest of my freezer stash from last year. We also have a lot of local honey we bought wholesale last fall. I figured that there wasn't much chance of creating something that wasn't edible.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jelly

Yield: 5 cups

1 gal frozen strawberries

2 qt frozen rhubarb

1 1/2 c honey

1/2 c hot water

1 pkg No Sugar Needed Fruit Pectin

Cook everything but the pectin together until the fruit has softened and it starts looking thick and syrupy.

Strain the mixture through a jelly strainer bag (we used a fermentation bag).

Reserve the liquid and eat the puree. :) We like it with custard or ice cream.

(I ended up with 5 cups of syrup but if I ended up with less, I would add hot water to bring it up to 5 cups.)

Reheat the syrup and add the pectin, cooking according to package directions.

Seal in jars using current safe canning methods.

We are using it instead of maple syrup on breakfast food. We had it on french toast last weekend. It was pure heaven.

Quentin's Marinara

Q got ambitious and created his own marinara recipe. It is much, much more complicated to make than my usual but it is very, very good.

The recipe...
4 lbs. Roma tomatoes, cut into chunks
1/4 c. diced onion
1 oz. diced garlic (about 6 large cloves)
1/2 oz. chopped basil (or about 2 T crushed dried)
1/4 oz. chopped oregano (or about 1 T crushed dried)
1 T parsley
4 T olive oil
2 T butter, cut into chunks
1 1/2 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/2 t crushed red pepper

Here it is, ready for the oven. We cook it in a 350 degree F oven for 2 1/2 - 3 hours.

Canned Suncrest Peaches

Around here, the first canning peaches ready are the Suncrests and, since we're going to be out of town for the end of August, I needed to get a quick start this year on Quentin's winter supply.

I made 14 quarts of canned peaches plus a crisp out of 2 boxes ($18.99/box) of peaches. It was the longest, most torturous canning I have ever done. The peaches were quite a bit less ripe than I had thought so they didn't skin well, even after blanching, and their "freestones" were not quite free yet. At least I got a lot of practice paring...? Sometimes bright sides are a little tricky to find. It seemed absurd that only two canner loads ate up 6 hours of my time.

I'm just over a third of the way to my goal of 40 quarts for this season. Rather than going to Detering's and buying them by the box next time I'm going to go to Bush Fern View and pick them myself. That way I'll have more control over their ripeness and if it's difficult it will be my own fault. :)

Unrelated but still lovely, Q and I had an omelet for lunch that consisted of Little Miss' first 5 eggs (produced in five days!).

Food Preparation

On Sunday, it is not unusual for me to start the day in the kitchen making breakfast and then never quite leave. I did that last Sunday morning and it tends to make my week a bit smoother when it comes to meal planning. It all started with making waffles, which is always a good start to anything. :)

The first order of business after breakfast was getting the chicken stock I had made a couple of days previously out of the fridge. It's always got to cool before anything else is done to it so the fat can solidify at the top so stock-making is always a slightly extended process. After taking one look in the freezer, I decided to can stock for the first time. :) It does require pressure canning but is super easy to can if you're familiar with the pressure canner. It took me a little extra time this morning because I put the pressure canner through a practice run (nothing in it but water) since this was its first use of the season.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation's recipe made me laugh though. After boiling chicken for only 30 or 45 minutes all it seems like you would have is vaguely flavored water, not stock - what's the point of preserving that? I simmer my stock for about 8-10 hours and up to 24 (as per Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions), using bones so I don't have to worry about wasting the meat. Bones from roasted chickens, by the way, impart amazing flavor to stock.

The canning seems to have been very successful, with all the jars appearing to (and sounding like) they sealed within the first hour. Ah, the beautiful "ping" of jar lids!


There was still a quart of syrup in the fridge from apricot drying that was basically a simple sugar/honey syrup heavily infused with apricots. After all of the apricots had been soaked in the solution before drying, I strained it to produce a clear, very tasty, syrup but it was too runny to be useful for much. Mom left 2 t. of Pomona Universal Pectin on the table and the activating calcium water in the fridge when she left, remnants of the sugar free jam trials, so I boiled up the syrup (with a couple teaspoons of calcium water) and stirred in the pectin. By evening, it had stiffened up beautifully into a runny jelly/very thick syrup. Looks like we'll be needing to make waffles again in the very near future. Here it is as a topping on ice cream. Yum!

I finally remembered to take a picture of the breakfast cookies that we are so in love with around here. I made a double batch so I could have them for lunches this week too and still have enough for breakfast. As always, I added about 1/2 c. of flour per batch, replaced the applesauce with apricot puree, and used almonds and dried cherries instead of walnuts and raisins.

We also cooked a nice 2-lb beef roast for Q to have in lunches this week and for us to have as beef au jus one night. Monday's dinner was toasted hoagie rolls layered with roast beef and provolone put under the broiler just long enough to melt the cheese. We had a little bit of au jus leftover in the freezer from when the parents were here.

Oh how I love the deep satisfaction of knowing that the kitchen and pantry are stuffed with time-saving good things to eat!

Seeing Blue

Mom and Dad left yesterday morning. Their car carried 49 pints of blackberry jam, about a dozen pints of sugar-free blackberry jam, 15 jars of blueberry pie filling, and 11 jars of blackberry pie filling for Mom's sale in November. They also took back other preserved stuff for their own consumption - apricot puree, pickles, apple butter, and dried apricots and cherries.

You may wonder how many blackberries and blueberries such riches require. We picked 30 pounds of blueberries last Saturday. Over the course of their time here we picked about 80 quarts of blackberries. That's a lot of picking and a lot of processing!

Before we made the pie fillings, which was a new thing, we had to do lots of testing to make sure they would work as an easy to make crisp. Just add butter to the topping mix, put everything in a casserole and bake. Testing was delicious.

We ended up using these recipes for the blackberry and blueberry fillings and the topping from an absolutely delicious apricot crisp recipe. I love this topping - I can't imagine not having almonds in my crisp now! We made a gluten free version that was just as good as the original by substituting 1/4 c potato starch and 1/4 c rice flour for the 1/2 c of flour.

Yesterday after they left I managed to get together a double batch of lasagna - one for us and one for the freezer. This is the first time I've used our own oregano, basil and onion along with the home canned marinara. It again strengthened my resolve to start making mozzarella and ricotta. Of course then I'd just decide that we'd have to make our own pasta too...where would it end? ;)

And I just had to post today's dinner since it's one of my favorites and this is the first time we've made it this season. We've only gotten two little tomatoes out of the garden so far so they had to be purchased from a farmer but the basil is ours.
And, for the record, today I planted the fall/winter garden - brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, carrots, parsnips, red onions, garlic, peas, lettuce, and spinach. I've had varied success with winter plantings so far. We'll see how this one goes.