First Batch of Peaches

Today's work was 20 quarts of peaches. I also got 1 1/2 quarts of sauce simmered down, partially from our tomatoes and partially from some I was given.

Yesterday's work was mainly getting school stuff together but I made the first batch of bread from the rice flour we bought. The "bread muffins" were the closest approximation I could get to buns for our sloppies last night. I'm researching flour combos to make bread that has a little more body.

Monday night's dessert - rhubarb fool with whipped cream.

The four or five black-eyed pea pods we got are seeming quite mature. It will be fun when they dry out and I get to make a tiny, tiny batch of black-eyed peas.

Our crookneck squash finally has started producing. We've got this one and a couple others that look like they've started.

Banana Pink Jumbo Squash - about 14" long now. Is it really possible it's supposed to get two times as large?!

Freezing Lasagna

I made and froze lasagna this morning. It's such a delightful food but is so time consuming that it never seems practical to make it from scratch on a school day. Thankfully, it freezes well. I used this recipe for inspiration but the recipe below is what I actually did. :)

Lasagna
(this recipe made 3- 9"x13" pans)
3 lbs. ground beef
3 quarts marinara
3 lbs. ricotta
8 c. shredded mozzarella
1 1/2 c. Parmesan
6 eggs
3/4 t. salt
1 1/2 t dried parsley
1 1/2 t dried oregano
1/2 t ground pepper
1 1/2 lb. lasagna noodles

1) Cook the noodles, drain, and run cold water over them.
2) Brown the ground beef and drain. Add the marinara, stir, and simmer while you prepare the cheese.
3) Mix together the ricotta and eggs. Add the salt, parsley, oregano, and pepper. Mix in the mozzarella and parmesan.
4) Place a layer of sauce in the bottom of each pan. Next, place 3 noodles over the sauce. Spread half of each pan's cheese mixture over the noodles and cover this layer with sauce. Repeat the noodle, cheese, and marinara layers. Finish with a layer of noodles, a thin layer of sauce, and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Freeze.
5) When you're ready to eat it, thaw the lasagna then bake it, covered, for 50-60 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Uncover and bake another 10 minutes.


These three eggplants, about 8 oz. each, came out of the garden this morning. I prepared extra meat sauce and noodles as I made lasagna and they're going to make up dinner tonight. Yum.
I also got enough tomatoes out of the garden to simmer down 2 c. of sauce while I cooked.

You must see this movie...

I ended up biking to the movie theater yesterday and seeing Julie and Julia. I've really been wanting to see it but feared I couldn't go yesterday because the weather's been so bad. It seemed like it had been mostly clear for a while when it was time to go but I put on a rain jaI'cket just in case. In the time it took me to wheel my bike from the shed around to the driveway it went from light sprinkles to steady rain. At that point I couldn't give up though, right? It was a rather damp 15 minutes to the mall.

Visually, I love this movie for all of the beautiful food and the mid-fifties to sixties fashions. The actresses are fantastic. I'd never seen Amy Adams until we rented Sunshine Cleaning last week and have now been impressed twice by her performances. Meryl Streep as Julia Child steals the movie though. It's hilarious. She's not doing an impression, even though it's such an over the top character. She just is Julia Child.

It's interesting to me how often women are portrayed as needing to find direction in their lives, feeling lost, before they find their calling. It's a story I enjoy watching but I realized that it never seems to be explored as a male problem. Men don't externalize the seeking? They're so busy having to have careers and support themselves and others that they don't have time for it to come up? Maybe it happens plenty in real life but there's no one who would be interested in going to the movie about it since women tend to like watching movies about other women and men tend to like watching movies with more intrigue/adventure. More "plot" and less "character".

Anyway, everybody on the planet should go see the movie. It had me laughing out loud many times and I went home very hungry. I simply must be brave enough to try the beef bourguignon sometime. The problem is that that would involve following a recipe exactly though, which I'm not entirely sure I'm capable of doing. However, I also don't think I'd be sacrilegious enough to casually fling ingredients in the way I do when I'm following Julia Child's recipe. And heres a link to a youtube video of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin making sandwiches. It's somehow utterly hilarious without meaning to be (but in a good, uplifting way).

Marinara and Pickles are Done

The day has been very full. I've been processing food since 9:30a, with only a 45 minute break to bike to the grocery. It's now 8:15p and the last pickles are just coming out of the canner. The rest of the kitchen clean-up can wait until tomorrow. It's so much easier when I don't have to clean around all of the cooling jars anyway (so I tell myself).

I cut up about 30 Romas, 1 large white onion, and 3 medium cloves of garlic; place them in a pan; and drizzle them with olive oil. They roast at 350 degrees, stirring as needed, with the oven door cracked (with the help of a cookie sheet) to let steam escape.

After they're done roasting most of the moisture is gone. This seems to take about 1 1/2 hours.
At this point, I just run it through the food processor and put it in a pot on the stove to keep hot until there's enough for a canner load.

I did 10 pans of tomatoes today, roughly 50 pounds. I even got to include about 20 of the tomatoes from the garden. :) I ended up with 18 1/2 qts. of marinara. All 14 that I pressure canned actually sealed! I must be getting the hang of this. (Notice the beautiful bouquet that Q got me before he left.)

The uncanned quarts of marinara are in the fridge. I got all the stuff that we needed for making 3 lasagnas for the freezer from the grocery and I'll probably just freeze the last full quart of marinara and have the 1/2 quart for dinner tomorrow. I'm hoping my oomph will be reborn tomorrow morning. If not, I'll definitely make lasagna Sunday. I just keep the vision of how tired I often am after school dancing before my head as I try to pack the freezer full.

After I finished the marinara, I moved on to pickles, which is a new endeavor for me. Q had picked up 10 lbs. from Thistledown and my recipe said about 1 lb/qt. but I ended up with 13 quarts. I seemed to get about 12-14 oz./ qt. instead of a full pound. There was lots of brine but one can only pack cucumbers so efficiently. It was fun getting to use all the dill we grew. I hope they're good - but we won't know until the beginning of November. Pickles are a patient food.

I can't believe how orange this pumpkin's getting.

The ever growing Jumbo Pink Banana Squash.

Making Yogurt

(Update 9/4: Camera all better so picture was added)
No pictures today (the camera's acting strangely and Q needs to get home to look at it) but I needed to report that we made yogurt for the first time. It is remarkably easy. We followed the basic instructions from this article except we had a little less than half-a-gallon (minus one glass for Q with chocolate cupcake) and I used a whole 6 oz. container of Plain Organic Nancy's Nonfat Yogurt.

After heating the milk on the stove, we cooled it to 115 degrees and added the yogurt. Covering it with the lid, we put it in the oven, which had been set on warm for a couple of minutes before being turned off, and let it sit overnight.

The next morning, Q put a thin towel into a colander and poured the mixture into it. Not much drained and he had to leave the house, so he put the whole colander, covered with the lid, in the pot and refrigerated it. This morning was the first chance I had to deal with it. It had drained a lot and only produced about 2 cups of yogurt at the end.

I don't think I'd let it drain so long next time. It's fantastic, mild and creamy but it's a little...gluey? A bit more cohesiveness than yogurt usually has. I'm curious if it has to do with how long we let it drain, the fact we used skim milk, the fact I put in more starter than it officially called for or ? The article mentions how the originally heating changes the proteins. I don't know if maybe I didn't heat it hot enough originally and that could account for it too. If anyone out there has theories, do share.

I'm still enjoying it immensely. I mixed in about a teaspoon and a half of vanilla. There was supposed to be a picture of my bowl, one side full of creamy white yogurt and the other full of fat strawberries, defrosted from this year's harvest. I've also been sprinkling about a couple teaspoons of sugar on my bowl to supplement the sweetness from the fruit. I figure that still has to be better than store yogurt, which I suspect has a great deal more sugar as well as all the stabilizers and preservatives. Hmmmm...maybe the next batch will have a different texture because it won't have so much of the original stuff in it...something in the stable shelf life yogurt maybe affected it. I'm going to get more milk and process another batch when I just have a quarter cup or so left of batch one.

Tomatoes have been Preserved

I spent a delightful day at the house of a favorite friend's mother-in-law. We canned there from 8am to 6:30pm today. She's got two incredibly sweet little girls who are a joy to be around and a testament to what good parenting accomplishes. Out of the 200 lbs. of tomatoes I brought, based on an estimate of what it would take to meet what we were hoping for, we actually had 50 pounds left over.

Therefore, we now know that 150 lbs. of Roma tomatoes make...
8 quart + 7 pints + 20 oz. of sauce
44 quarts of diced tomatoes

We were very proud. For most of the day we had 6 burners, including 2 canners going. That's a lot of tomatoes.

I'll use the last 50 lbs. to make another 1 1/2 qts. or so of sauce and then marinara (probably another 11 quarts) in the next c0uple of days. Q was also kind enough to pick up 10 pounds of pickling cukes today, so I'll also have those to do. That will leave only 49 qts. peaches, 14 qts. pears, and 14 qts. apple sauce on my dream canning list for this season. I also want to freeze a whole bunch (a gallon?) of diced green pepper, since they're so cheap this time of year. I want to also get some quick meals (lasagna, 3 Bean Casserole, chili) and some lunch food (Cornish pasties)
in the freezer soon. The cabbage will also be maturing in the next couple of months so I want to learn how to make a vat of sauerkraut and put some cabbage burger filling (cooked ground beef, onions, cabbage) into the freezer for more fast meals. I wish schools still followed a proper agricultural schedule. As it is, I always have to go back to teaching just when the main preservation season is in full swing. It's cruel.

We went roaming some thrift stores the other day and came away with the first 10 jars for Mom's collection for next year's boutique jam and jelly - 1 pint, 6 half pints, and 3 quarters. Yay!
I didn't expect to find anything during canning season itself.
I love jars. I love them empty, replete with possibilities and imaginations of what they have held. I love them full; small, dense packages of summer sunshine that warm winter days. I love the link they give to the past, knowing that I'm using many of the same jars that my grandmother used, possibly even when I was a small child. I love the link to the future - my friend showing her 2-year-old up to see the finished jars and talking about this winter's delights after the little girl eagerly helped us peel the tomatoes.

One of the pumpkins is actually getting some color!

Lucky Day

We saw five herons today on our ten mile bike ride! It's a new record. Today is cool and overcast, so maybe they like the weather; no sun means no glare off the water as they fish?

We also picked another two large cucumbers from the garden today. I'm so impressed that no matter how large they are they don't seem to get bitter.