Tag: squash

Canning and Preserving · Recipe Roundup

Because I Can…

LSiehLeave a comment

There’s probably a cheesier canning joke to use instead of that one, but I couldn’t think of it at the time. Feel free to add some to my comments to make us all laugh. Or sigh with resignation at the terrible puns. Either way would be fun! 😉

I was feeling the canning urge last week and this weekend, so I thought I should probably do something about it. I picked up a big box of tomatoes from the local farm store today and have made it through about half. I did have some nice garden tomatoes to add into all the batches of tomato products. Tomorrow I’m planning to make some pasta and pizza sauce and maybe some crushed tomatoes too. These are two of the beefsteak tomatoes that grew this year.

Most of the tomatoes I used for salsa had the small and medium tomatoes in them, so I had to supplement with store tomatoes too. I used a Fresh Preserving/Ball book recipe for Jalapeño Salsa. I don’t have a link for the recipe, as it doesn’t appear to be online. This second salsa recipe is though- Fire Roasted Salsa from The Hungry Bluebird: https://thehungrybluebird.com/fire-roasted-salsa-canning-recipe/

I was able to use all garden jalapeño peppers for both salsas! It always makes me happy. They are super spicy though, so it will be interesting to see how they age. I plan to make another slightly more mild salsa with calmer peppers too, as we do have friends who do not enjoy breathing fire. 😆

I also made squash pickles from Southern Living: Small Jars, Big Flavors, with some help from the neighbors’ garden. I texted to ask her if she had any extra zucchini, as I think the ants ate our plants and she said “You never need an invitation to the garden!” I’m going to bring her a pint of them in thanks! My yellow squash made a surprise recovery, so I was able to use some of our garden squash too. Here are the jalapeño salsa and the squash pickles all canned up!

Both salsas made one extra jar that wasn’t full enough to can, so our fridge is full of homemade salsa. I’m thinking I’ll make some enchiladas or something to use it up. Oh! Or crockpot Salsa chicken one night! It’s super simple, you throw chicken breasts in the crockpot, throw some broth and salsa on top and cook for a while until they shred easily. It’s really good in tacos or even just over rice.

I also made jams and marveled at how long the tomato products take compared to the jams. I think I made three jams in the time it took to make one batch of salsa and the canning part of the squash pickles. They sat for a few hours in an ice bowl with salt to brine first.

For jams, I made a Strawberry Rhubarb, and a Cinnamon Rhubarb. The Strawberry Rhubarb is on the right, cinnamon is on the left.

Both jams used garden rhubarb! I used the Ball book recipe for the Strawberry Rhubarb and this recipe for the cinnamon. https://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/canning-101-rhubarb-cinnamon-jam-recipe/

They may have been a tiny bit more processed than they should have been, as they are a pretty thick jam. I’m hoping I didn’t accidentally make rhubarb candy instead of jam in the canned jars. I was lucky enough to have a little over half a jar left of each and have tried both in yogurt. They taste delicious!

The Spiced Peach jam is the same blog as the Rhubarb Cinnamon. https://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/home-canning-spiced-peach-jam-recipe/

Technically my version is Spiced Stone Fruit, as I had a bag of peaches and nectarines in the freezer and added two pluots and a plum that had gone soft. I was on a mission to use up all my freezer fruit this year. It tastes like the best peach pie ever, so I’m excited to use it for breakfasts. Sadly, this did not give me a fridge jar, so I’ll have to use up some more of the rhubarb before I open it. It will be featured in the LOTR Culinary Journey this year for sure! I’m thinking little peach tartlets. Mmmm…

I don’t have a picture yet of the other two things I’ve canned, but they were this Fire-roasted Salsa from Hungry Bluebird mentioned above, and a Roasted Garlic Pizza Sauce from my Taste of Home Canning magazine. It’s delicious! It made a lot more than it said it would and I forgot to add the lemon to it, so we’re going to have to eat it quick. It does have acid from the tomatoes, wine, and salt in it, so I think it will be okay in the short term. If I get nervous, I can always reprocess or freeze it for longer storage.

Piggy has taken to sitting on the kitchen rug by the back door in hopes that I’ll let her play outside while I’m canning. Unfortunately, her idea of “playing” is eating the really bitter apples from the apple tree and making herself sick, so we’re not really letting her out unsupervised. I wish that the apples would be good ones. They have gotten bigger this year, but are still horrible. I think we need to get an arborist to tell us how to fix it. It’s very productive still, so if we could get the apples to be edible, that would be wonderful!

Anyway, that is the start of my canning. I still have berries to make into syrup, a small bag of apricots, and half a box of tomatoes, plus a rather lot of peppers. I see more salsa and maybe some canned crushed tomatoes in my future. Jams too, of course, and some berry lemonade concentrate. We don’t have a lot planned for the next couple weekends and then in October, it will be time to make more applesauce.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my motivational canning towel. Have a great night!

The Squash Have Invaded
Gardening

The Squash Have Invaded

LSiehLeave a comment

I hope y’all didn’t think the squash had gotten me in my post absence! We have had a lot of them, but I think they’re under control for the moment. Possibly. I trimmed my vines pretty drastically to get rid of the mildewy and dead leaves, so we’ll see if that helps or hurts. At last count, I think I had gotten 15 yellow squash off the single plant I have. Only about 4 zukes though. Luckily, the people at work are still charmed by my increasingly desperate emails if “Please save me and help yourself to the squash in the fridge.”

This was the plant before I cut it.

This was how many squash were growing at the beginning of this week. I have since brought 4 into work and have plans for the others as squash pickles. This is one side of the plant, by the way. The second side had just as many. *nervous chuckles* Yeah, it’s totally under control.

I had so many that we jokingly asked both house repair estimate guys if we could pay in squash. 😆 They both laughed a little nervously and started backing away fingering their car keys. I swear I may have heard both car locks beep to make sure we couldn’t sneak any squash in their vehicles.

My neighbor gave me a second enormous pile of cucumbers, which have made the office manager at work very happy. The first time she gave me some, she snuck a zuke in the bottom of the bag. It’s the enormous one at the top.

The two big zukes have been shredded and put in 2 cup portions in the freezer. I ended up with about 8 cups of shreds all together. Two cups of them went into a loaf of chocolate zucchini bread, which is delicious!

Most of the other things in the garden are doing well. My zucchini plants are having a bit of a rough go, but are still producing. My jalapeño peppers have given me several. I need to make some fresh salsa soon.

My small tomatoes have been growing really well. My bigger tomatoes have been slower growing as well, but I have heard from other people that it hasn’t been a good year for them either.

I have a bell pepper growing and a couple of cucumbers.

My herbs are recovering from it being super hot again, but they were doing really well. I made basil pesto from garden herbs to take up north with us and it was fabulous.

I had a handful of peas and beans, but the squash is doing its best to strangle them.

Piggy likes to browse the herbs for a fresh salad when she thinks we’re not looking. You’d think this would help her doggy breath, but you’d be wrong. 🙄

My nasturtiums are growing all over the place and I love it! I’m going to harvest and dry the blooms for fancy butter for our LOTR party this year and to make fancy floral sugar.

So overall, it’s a good garden year and I’m revising plans for next year already. Soon I’m hoping to start canning things, although I’ll have to find a good source for tomatoes. Wish me luck on that! I’ll send good garden vibes your way!

Gardening

How Does Your Garden Grow?

LSiehLeave a comment

A little too well currently! My yellow squash plant is taking over, as one would expect from a squash. I know my Dad will agree with me on that one. Squash is his sworn enemy, after all. 😉 Here’s the squash in question.

The squirrels have already started plotting their garden attacks. Mysteriously, there are baby squash bits in my garden. Piggy has been investigating the herb garden and has rediscovered the green apples in the lawn. She likes the crunch because she will pick one up and eat it while running gleefully away from us when we try to get them back.

It’s hard to see the other plants in my squash bed, but I do have a bunch of cucumbers, peas, beans, and peppers. Also carrots down the middle so they’re out of the way. I’m going to go tie up the squash plants and prune the leaves a little when it finally stops raining.

The berry and squash bed is also doing well. I have some smaller plants in there.

The berries are looking a little rough, but I’m hoping that they’ll come back better next year. My poor blueberry bush is just a bunch of twigs, so I’ll have to keep buying them at the store, I guess. 🙁

The tomatoes look nice and have a lot of flowers starting, so I think that’s a good sign.

The herb garden is growing wonderfully well. I think I’m going to have to harvest and dry a bunch of the bee balm and the hyssop for tea. The Thai basil is destined for an Asian inspired pesto to go over rice noodles tomorrow for lunch.

My little salad buckets are doing really well too. I’ve had a couple of salads all from the garden, including the nasturtium leaves! I need to eat more salads this week to keep up with the arugula and lettuce growth.

We have a little garden friend too. Piggy gives it a heart attack about once a week by chasing it, but it seems to like our yard.

We are fighting poison ivy and think possibly the Husband may be immune. I am most definitely not, as evidenced by my recent doctor trip and itchiness. Ugh. Over all though, it seems to be going pretty well. I’m impatiently waiting for when I have other things besides lettuce and arugula to eat.

Hope you enjoyed the garden tour! I’m sure everything will be a lot different after all the rain predicted this week. I’m not looking forward to the weeding! I’d better go rest up now for it. 🙂

Canning Galore!
Canning and Preserving

Canning Galore!

LSiehLeave a comment

Hello! Besides canning this weekend, we also did some yard work. A lot of yard work. It was slightly unexpected yard work, but it made the yard look a lot better.

Notice anything missing? Here, I’ll show you another one…

We took the trellis down! Hooray!

We can see the garden from the house! We can watch the dog when she runs away at night and tries to find the skunk.

We are going to have to rent some equipment to get the two bushes out and are repurposing the trellis by retraining roses to grow on it instead of through the fence.

It was killing the apple tree and whatever else it could reach and really didn’t fit what we wanted our backyard to be.

We can also see the compost, which I forgot to say we started. I think it’s going well. I certainly added a lot to it this weekend. My full-blown canning run took up pretty much two whole days. I had to restrain myself on Sunday from canning more. I still have a list going of other recipes, but not enough time to make them all!

The only one not pictured is the ginger dill pickles from Epicurious. https://www-epicurious-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/ginger-dill-pickles-56389773/amp

I had one today and they need a little more time to cure, but will be good to serve for the summer party.

Here are the other pickles:

Hot Garlic Pickles and regular Garlic Pickles. They are from Better Homes and Gardens Canning from 2015.

I used the little tiny, but super hot peppers from the garden! They need to sit for a week, so I haven’t tried them yet. They should be both garlicky and spicy.

Squash Pickles! This is a recipe I’ve been wanting to try since last year, but I never had the ingredients at the same time. I halved the recipe. The Husband doesn’t eat pickles… I know, I don’t get it either…

These were made from the zucchini from the garden. The recipe came from Southern Living Little Jars, Big Flavors. 

These beans were not from the garden. 🙂 They are also from the same cookbook. I want to make almost everything in it.

This Spicy BBQ sauce was from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving. I made this recipe before, but with less spicy peppers. This year’s peppers were super spicy. I made this two weeks ago, I think. I used tomatoes from the freezer.

Also from the Blue Book is this Spicy Tomato Salsa. We are officially calling this Firebreather Salsa. I used all garden Jale-fuego peppers and a couple of tomatoes.

We have peach salsa too. No garden items in this one, but it smelled good. I’m excited to try this.

The peaches were wonderful. I will have to go back and get some more. More recipes to come!

I will be joining this puppers shortly.

I have to keep my strength up for party prep and more canning! Have a great night.

Canning and Gardening and Crafts, Oh My!
Canning and Preserving · Crafty · Gardening

Canning and Gardening and Crafts, Oh My!

LSiehLeave a comment

We had a lovely weekend. We had friends over on Sunday for crafting and video games and it was lots of fun. They helped us cook and we used the grill two days in a row!

Fancy was in heaven with two other people to pet her, plus we got her the treat she likes the best from the dog bakery. She’s currently recovering with multiple naps.

My craft this weekend was canning. I made five jars of pickles. There were originally 6, but one popped in the pot. I have always been afraid of it, but it’s probably good it happened with pickles. The mess that exploding jam would cause makes me cringe just thinking about it.

I found out when I went to check the  pot and there was a floating jar. That’s not a good thing to see when canning. The bottom just popped right out with a pretty clean cut. All the pickles stayed right in the jar too, so it wasn’t too bad to clean up. There wasn’t  good way to take a picture of it while it was still hot, but the picture up top is the circle of glass from the bottom.

Here are the intact pickles:

My friend had the brilliant idea to cut the cucumbers into chips after I found out I didn’t have enough wide- mouthed jars. Sometimes my prep skills could be a little better, but I thought I had more and was trying to avoid having to smuggle more jars past the Husband. Apparently I still haven’t canned enough for him. 🙂

I have a few more pickled veggies to add to my list, but not during this week. We are way too busy! I need to outdo my Mom’s pickle trays though, now that it’s become a thing.

My craft ladies discussed the differences between pickle and relish trays for about 45 minutes after they heard the story. My Mom was so proud when I told her. 🙂 This year for our parties, we’ll have homemade pickles!

On the crafty front, I cut a bunch of tea wallets over the last few days. I pulled from the red, brown, and purple scraps this time. I got in a groove and found myself with a huge pile of tea wallets needing to be made.

I worked on the purple ones first this time.

Here are the insides. The blue one at the top right has planets on the back and on the inside!

The garden is growing pretty well. We have three zucchini on the plant and a whole bunch of tomatoes coming in. The green pepper plant has two peppers on it. I couldn’t get a good picture of the “massive” jalapeños. There are three of them starting, but they are so far not living up to their name.

I did have a problem with blossom end rot on three of my big tomatoes. We’ve had a few days with a lot of rain and I probably need to add some more special fertilizer. I had the same problem with them last year and the internet said it was probably due to inconsistent watering. I was really terrible about watering enough last year.

The lettuce will be a wash this year. It’s completely covered in spiders and is starting to go brown. It’s quite sad. I have successfully grown baby lettuces before, so I think in the future I’ll stick to that.

I brought home my personal clipboards from work to collage, as I wanted to make sure I could tell them apart from the work ones. I’m going to just do the backs, so that there is still a smooth surface to write on. It will also let me go through some of my art supplies, as I need to have a bit more of it in the office right now.

Have a good night!