Life's a Peach

Whew!  I'm so glad that's over.  It all started with this...

This is the harvest from our big peach tree.  I even weighed them - over 200 pounds.  Pretty unbelievable, isn't it???  Factor in the fact that I thinned over 50 percent of the peaches off the tree when they were about the size of an olive.  One branch on the tree was completely unreachable, even with a ladder, so it didn't get thinned and yep, it broke under the weight of the peaches.  Oh, and I harvested about 30 additional pounds from the baby peach tree.  Yikes!  After convincing my children that they needed to eat some, I started processing.

Remember the empty freezer?  It's not so empty any more.  I sliced thirty oversize quarts worth of peaches to go into the formerly empty cavern.  (I usually process peaches into 5 cup 'quarts' as after the juice is drained, there's just enough peaches for most recipes.)

Then I fired up the canner.  First day, I made 'sploosh' for Ben...

He was a bit disappointed with the flavor, thought it was a bit weak compared to the apricot sploosh that he'd been drinking from past years.  So, I tweaked the recipe a bit.  On the next canning day, I went all out...

Ten quarts of sploosh and seven quarts of peach halves in extra light syrup.  Whew!  What a day!  Makes for a pretty picture, though, I think.  I hadn't canned peach halves in a long time, so I thought it was time to refresh my skills. 

I also made three peach pies, but forgot to get a picture before we ate one and put two into the freezer.  In addition, I've sliced up about three gallons of peaches that have gone into the fridge and then mysteriously disappeared.  Apparently Yehudi likes peaches.

After I rest a bit, I'll post about all the other goodies I've made lately.

In The Garden - April 12

All of a sudden - Poof!- it's spring around here.  Everything's blooming, everything's growing and if it's not doing either, it's time to plant it or prune it!

There are dozens of these little pea plants.  They look so sturdy and green against the brown soil.  Can't wait until they start producing those yummy peas!

My very disappointing asparagus bed.  With about 50 square feet of asparagus bed, I'd hoped for more than 3 spears at a time.  Grrr.

Looks silly, I know, but this method has been working pretty well for the last  couple of years.  After laying the beet and carrot seeds in the bottom of an appropriately deep trench, I fill the trench with sand.  The sand doesn't crust over like our soil does so that the seedlings don't struggle to come through.  I still add a few radish seeds to each row to help mark the row and because I like having a few radishes at a time.

This is a good news, bad news, pic.  In the foreground is the incredibly productive Italian soft-neck garlic that I planted last fall.  Every single clove produced a plant.  They're growing great and will be an awesome addition to my salsa and tomato products.  The bad news is the elephant garlic that is fizzling in the middle of the bed.  I planted 12 cloves and only two came up.  That is really disappointing.  Behind them are the onion seedlings that I bought at Lambert Floral last week.  They have the best onions! 

My 'Rutgers' tomatoes are staying warm and cozy in their walls o'water.  The temps have dipped to 28 since I planted the tomatoes, but they didn't even notice the cold.  I also added two 'Early Girl' tomato plants (again from Lambert) to the bed.  Those will be my own 'put tomatoes on everything' crop.

Close up of the Korean spice bush.  So beautiful and sooooo fragrant!

The Korean spice bush in all its spring glory.  The fragrance fills the back yard.  I've even caught Peri sniffing the flowers.  lol. 

We had an unusual 'snow' storm yesterday.  All these petals on the deck in the back yard came from the Callery pear tree in the front yard.  The air was thick with the petals, a kind of sweet spring blizzard.  The street in front of the house is covered as are the sidewalks, lawn and cars.

Baby Salsa II or In The Garden - January 28

Winter has finally come to Utah, but my garden is growing pretty well all the same.  I posted about my newborn tomato plants on January 17.  They've done much growing since then.  They've developed their first set of new leaves and today, were ready to each move out of the nursery pot and into their own home.

Getting pretty crowded in there!  Only eight of the eleven plants that originally sprouted were really worthy to move on to bigger pots.  The best of the best, as it were.  After scrubbing and bleaching the four-packs that I'd saved from last year, I moved the little plants, one by one, into fresh soil in a four-pack.  That step always makes me a bit nervous as there is so much that can go wrong.  Crushing or bruising the stem can  kill a plant that tiny.  Fortunately, I think all of them made it this time.  *crosses fingers*

Here they are, getting used to their new digs, so to speak.  I will probably need to repot them into bigger pots at least once, perhaps twice, before they go out into the garden in Walls O' Water around April 1.

While I had the potting soil out, I started Genovese basil, tomatillos, and a small, ornamental grass called Lagurus ovatus.  I'm hoping to use it in the barrels and pots instead of buying the expensive, already grown versions.

I've got the heat mat plugged in so that the seeds will germinate a bit faster.  It also seems to help the growth of the little starts at this early stage.  I moved the lights up out of the way so that I could get a photo, but usually the lights hang about an inch above the little leaves.

Baby Salsa

Have you ever wondered what newborn salsa looks like?  lol.  Probably something like this...

This is actually 11 newly germinated 'Rutgers' tomato plants.  After some extensive research online as to the best variety of tomato for home canning, I found that 'Rutgers' appeared on virtually every list.  And it was the only one that had such universal popularity.  So, although I rarely try to be with the 'in crowd', I'm going with the popular tomato as over 25 canners can't all be wrong.  Right?

And for the sake of full disclosure, I really did say that "no one needs ten tomato plants" back in August.  At the time, I believed it with all my heart.  That was before I tasted homemade catsup.  Now, I'm addicted.  The only way to have homemade catsup without a (expensive) visit to the farmer's market is to have about ten tomato plants in full production.  So, I'm eating my words.  With catsup on them. 

In The Garden - January 2

Even though the high temperatures this week have been record-breaking 50s, it's still much to cold to be planting outside.  However, it is the perfect time to be starting plants inside!  And I'm ready:

My seed order from Pinetree seeds arrived this week.  As always, I'm so impressed with their customer service.  My order was in my hands just three days from ordering all the way from Maine.  These are all the seeds I plan to plant this year ( I think).  Only about half of them need to be started early indoors.  And I'll be starting the first ones tomorrow now that I have the equipment cleaned up.

I scrubbed all the flats and pots with a brush and then soaked them in a bleach solution to kill any fungus that might affect the plant growth.  Yesterday, Mike and I stopped at Home Depot and bought seed starting mix and some peat pots for some of the finicky seedlings. 

Tomato seedlings take a while to get to optimum size for setting out so they're first on the list.  Then I'll be starting seeds every week or so until early summer.

Salsa Verde - ish

I think I've finally finished the canning for 2011!

This is a batch of salsa verde, made with tomatillos and peppers grown in our garden.  Yes, I realize that salsa verde is supposed to be all green.  I tried. I really tried.  But while I was waiting for the tomatillos to finally ripen a large enough crop to make the salsa, the jalapenos and serranos turned red.  So my salsa is 'verde-ish'.  lol  It's also pretty dang hot as most hot peppers get hotter as they ripen.  Gonna need some help eating all of this as the gringos around here aren't going to want much of it!

Currant News

Although I've already posted about my currant-juice-making adventures (here), I want to update as to the quantity of the finished product.  This year, I bottled 20 pints of strawberry currant juice total.  Last year, we ended  up with 12 pints so this year's harvest was substantially larger.  And that's including the few pounds of currants that the grandkids ate during a recent visit.  lol.  Normally those berries are waaaaay to tart to eat plain, but the berries were also larger and sweeter than in past years.

So to recap, this year's currant harvest was bigger, sweeter, later and juicier than in years past.  *insert big grin smiley here*

Big Job = Big Taste

Although today was the first time that I've ever canned chili sauce myself, I have had a long time love for it.  No, not the store-bought stuff with HFCS 'corn sugar' in it.  The lovely homemade tomatoey, spicy, sweet kind of chili sauce is what I'm talkin' 'bout! 

Over the years, I've tasted many people's version of this condiment.  Some were really awesome (thanks, Aunt Mary!) and some were pretty awful (names deleted to protect the innocent.)  I knew what I wanted my chili sauce to taste like and finally found a recipe that looked like it might work in the Ball Big Book.

After a trip to the Farmer's Market for tomates, I was able to harvest pretty much all the rest of the vegetables needed from the garden.  My one change to the recipe involved a jalapeno pepper.  I just couldn't figure out how a cook could call her finished product 'chili sauce' if it had absolutely no chiles in it.  So, I added one to give it a teeny, tiny little kick. 

Three and a half hours later, I was finished.  Holy cow, that took longer than the peach pie filling that I've previously whined about!  I ended up with 7 and 3/4 pints.  Since my canner only holds 7 pints at a time, that meant that I had to sacrifice and begin eating the 3/4 pint immediately.  Sam was good enough to help me out.  We ate one bowl full on tortilla chips.  Yum, yum, yum.  Then we put it on our cheeseburgers instead of catsup.  OMGosh!  It was lucious.  I'm going to really enjoy the fruits of my labors, but I don't think I'll be making another batch until next year.  I'm pooped!

Peachy Keen Redux

Whew!  I feel like I had a walk on the wild side.  The peachy wild side, that is.  I checked the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving out of the library.  Got sucked in immediately.  lol!  So many 'I gotta try this' recipes in there.  Anyway, I quickly discovered that I had all the ingredients on hand to make several recipes.  My first new recipe was Peach Barbeque Sauce...

The batch was exactly four pints, so I only got a little taste, but it was yummy!  We're going to try it out tonight on oven-bbqed pork chops.

The next recipe I tried was peach salsa, one of the most beautiful salsas that I've ever seen...

Again, the batch was exactly four pints, so licking the spoon gave me my only taste.  It was good, but not as flavorful as the salsa that Carin and I made early in the summer, I don't think.  I'm going to need several (dozen) more tastes before I make up my mind.

Update:  Oh my heavens! For dinner, we had those bbq-ed pork chops that I mentioned earlier.  They were so delish!  The sauce turned out to be sweet and just a little spicy.  Woo Hoo!  I think I'm going to make another batch.

Peachy Keen

My cup runneth over.  With peaches, that is.  Between my little, baby peach tree and the full-grown monster peach tree, I'm estimating we have 3-4 bushels of peaches.  Since the freezer still contains much of last year's bounteous peach harvest, I've had to be creative.  Four batches of peach jam hardly made a dent in the crop.  So, I've been canning peach pie filling for the first time.

It's a labor-intensive process.  Many more steps than any thing I've ever canned.  The first couple of batches came out six quarts to the tablespoon so I didn't really get a taste of the finished product.  This last batch had about half a cup over six quarts so I've finally gotten a taste.  It's very good...will be even better when I'm not absolutely sick of looking at peaches...oh, say, February.

This is also my first canning project using the starch known as Clear Jel, or Thick Gel, as the brand I'm using is called.  That is some powerful stuff!  Think cornstarch on powerlifter steroids.  The first batch I made was so thick that I nearly broke a spoon stirring it.   I cut back on the amount by 1/2 cup in subsequent batches and that seems to be working much better.  I have a few other variations that I want to try as I work my way through mounds of peaches.  I'm going to try juicing some of the softer peaches, then use that juice instead of all lemon juice in the pie filling.  I should probably get around to making a pie out of this stuff, too, to make sure that it really does hold up through the baking process, too.  Pie anyone?!?

Happiness is...

...a working microwave.

...a pantry full of homemade jam.  This one is banana bread nut butter.  Yum!

...someone willing to pickle their nose to help me make pickled beets.  Thanks Carin!  You are awesome!

Dilly Beans

Since I've already posted lots of gardening stuff this week, how about a canning post today instead?!?  For the first time, I canned dilly beans..

I think they look pretty tasty.  They are supposed to remain unmolested for two weeks to allow those lovely beans to 'pickle'.  *taps fingers*  Now I have to wait.

Just for the record, I grew these beans with this canning project in mind.  I'm really pleased with this variety of bean.  They are so straight and smooth, made it easy to get them in the jars.  Now I just need to figure out what to do with the other 75% of the crop.  May have to make a few more jars of dilly beans!

Thanks to my awesome daughter Carin and her gracious in-laws for this recipe.

A Sense of Security

Just as I'm finally getting a handle on the weeding and flower maintenance, the harvest has begun!!!  No, I'm not talking about the five or so pounds of sugar snap peas that Mike and I have consumed in the last couple of weeks.  I'm talking about the kind of harvest where I spend hours in the kitchen processing yummy things and then we have delicious goodies in the pantry to eat all winter.

Both the strawberries and the red currants ripened at the same time this year.  I consider that a real boon as the strawberry currant juice is much more than the sum of its parts.  The six pints that I bottled today are a little over half of the harvest.  The rest of the berries should be ready by the weekend, so I'll be back in the kitchen then.

Oh, and in case you wondered what all the whooping and hollering was earlier today, I finally worked up the nerve to edit the registry on my computer.  I've managed to get the printer working again.  I have been lost without the ability to print.  Oh, yeah.  I'm a geek.