I had a nice visit with my mom. I played a lot of piano. I wrote (but not enough). I edited (more than enough). I cooked lots of boring, repetitive things that used stuff in the freezer. I gardened nearly continuously.

Somehow, I [...]]]> Let’s see. What did I do the past month, while I was on blog and Twitter and Facebook hiatus?

I had a nice visit with my mom.
I played a lot of piano.
I wrote (but not enough).
I edited (more than enough).
I cooked lots of boring, repetitive things that used stuff in the freezer.
I gardened nearly continuously.

Somehow, I suspect only this last one is of interest to you, loyal readers (you may think you want to know what I did with all of those green beans and corn and CSA pork in the freezer, but—trust me—you don’t). The garden has been my salvation this spring. Winter was long and rough, but playing in the dirt has done me a world of good.

And lordy, but I have a lot of dirt!

Garden 1:

This is my 4′x11′ or so plot at St. Bernard Community Garden, a lovely little spot on a vacant lot in West Philadelphia. It’s my third year in this plot, and I’m finally getting the hang of the space, the light, and the seasons. If everything goes as planned, I should be able to do a full spring, summer, and fall crop. Not that you can see the darling seedlings, but from front to back, there’s:

snap peas
snow peas
leeks (overwintered)
kohlrabi
red beets
turnips
yellow beets
more red beets
carrots
arugula, lettuces, and spinach
kale (overwintered)
radishes

The plan is to put in tomatoes when the lettuces, etc., start to go, and possibly put in sweet potatoes after the first round of beets et al. Or maybe just plant more beets. I love beets.

Garden 2:

This is my brand new, enormous plot at an undisclosed vacant lot very convenient to my house. I inherited it from a neighbor who had enthusiastically planted lots and lots of bulbs in years past. So far, I’ve managed to extract (and save!) the tulips, day lillies, and daffodils from the middle section, but you can see the irises lurking there in the back. Once the irises bloom, baby, they’re outta here.

The big middle section is currently empty, awaiting cucumbers, zucchini, and winter squash come warmer weather. The front section is full of cabbage-family plants: bok choi, more kale, broccoli raab, broccoli, cauliflower, red cabbage, and Brussel sprouts. In other words: I’m sticking above ground with this garden until I’ve had at least a full season to work the soil.

And finally…

A big thanks for the folks at Hometown Seeds, who sent me this space-age “Survival Pack” of non-GMO, non-hybrid seeds. So far, every seed I’ve started in my peat pots has germinated, so I’m impressed. Supposedly the pack will last 10 years unopened in your freezer if, you know, you’re worried about, um, the future. Or something. But seriously: they’re good seeds.

So go play in the dirt! You’ll feel better, and, in July, you’ll be glad you did.

No contest.

The canned applesacue is sooooo much better than the frozen. It has excellent texture, a [...]]]>
Last year, you may recall, I made a lot of applesauce. When I had time, I canned it; when I was lazy, I just stuck it in the freezer. Nine months later, we’ve been eating lots of each. The results?

No contest.

The canned applesacue is sooooo much better than the frozen. It has excellent texture, a great taste, and you don’t have to remember to thaw it. The freezer applesauce is…well…gummy. It’s fine to bake with, but I’d only eat it in a pinch. I suppose it’s possible that all of the gummy apples ended up in the freezer batches, but that seems highly unlikely, no?

If you, too, want to can applesauce, you have some choices. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says 15 minutes for pints and 20 minutes for quarts in a boiling water bath. If you’d rather use a pressure cooker, they recommend 8 minutes for pints, 10 minutes for quarts, both at 5 pounds of pressure. When I’ve done this, I’ve always used 10 pounds of pressure for 0 minutes, which seems to work pretty well, too, but note that you do so at your own risk.

Straight out of the [...]]]>
Should you be so lucky as to still have access to peaches, and should you decide to can some, may I recommend a) that you drown them in honey and b) that you can the leftover juice/syrup/nectar as a base for delicious cocktails for sometime in the future?

Peaches in Honey (for canning)

Straight out of the Ball Blue Book: Make a syrup with a ratio of 1 sugar to 2 honey to 4 water. Peel your peaches, cut them in half, and bring them to boil in the syrup. Transfer the peaches facedown to clean, hot jars and cover with syrup. Run a knife or spatula around the edges to remove air bubbles, then add more syrup if necessary. Adjust two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, 20 minutes for pints and 25 minutes for quarts.

Peach Syrup

Now look in the pan. There’s still syrup! Drink it now, or drink it later. To can: transfer into clean, hot jars, adjust the lids, and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Remember to remove the bands and wipe down the jars before storing them—they will be sticky.

Tomatoes are an interesting case because they straddle the [...]]]>
As you might have guessed given my giant pile of tomatoes, my next few posts will be all about things you can do with them: roasted tomatoes, roasted tomato salsa, tomato sauce, and mixed pepper sales. But first, let’s do the basics. How do you can tomatoes?

Tomatoes are an interesting case because they straddle the line of low-acid/high-acid food. Technically a fruit, we typically think of them as vegetables. Like most other fruits, however, they are sufficiently acidic that you can can them in a water-bath…but this is where it gets tricky. The USDA recommends that you add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice per pint, just to make sure that the acid levels are high enough. They also recommend that you process them for 40 minutes, which is much longer than I like to cook my tomatoes. The 40-minute recommendation actually came as a shock to me because for years I’ve been working with instructions that say that you only need 15 minutes for a hot pack (more on that below). Apparently, the USDA updated its guidelines in 1989 to reflect growing concerns about food-borne illness. In the case of tomatoes, the biggest concern is salmonella, not botulism.

Personally, I think this is ridiculous. I have been eating 15-minute processed tomatoes my whole life, to no dire effects. Of course, the canned tomatoes that I eat were usually either grown by someone I know or purchased at a local farmer’s market—not conditions likely to breed salmonella. If you decide to go the 15-minute route, you are doing so at your own risk (I assume no liability for your canning choices). I’m just saying that you should use common sense. Wash your hands, wash your food, remove tomato skins, and don’t purchase industrial produce. If you want to be extra-cautious, you can boil your canned tomatoes for 10 minutes when you open the jars. Or you could just follow the USDA’s advice and process them for 40 minutes.

Now: my flip attitude toward the 40-minute rule is only for hot-packed tomatoes. When you can tomatoes, as when you can most fruit, you have a choice. In a cold or raw pack, you put raw fruit in jars and cover them with some sort of boiling liquid. In a hot pack, you bring the fruit to a boil with the liquid, then transfer them to the jars. If you’re using a raw pack, you need to process your tomatoes for 40 minutes. Period. I find that I get better results with a hot pack when I process in a water-bath canner. Fruit shrinks when you heat it. If you’re doing a raw pack, it shrinks in the jars, meaning that you’ll end up with a lot less fruit than you anticipated. When you hot pack, the fruit shrinks before you put it in the jars, which means that you can use fewer jars for the same amount of produce. And, of course, if you’re worried about salmonella, boiling the tomatoes before you can them should help with that.

The alternative is to process your tomatoes in a pressure cooker. This has been my choice lately, both because it uses less energy and because the heat of the pressure cooker will kill just about anything. You can also skip the lemon juice. The catch is that some people feel that the texture of the tomatoes suffer from the heat of the process. I haven’t found that to be the case, but there is an aesthetic issue. Pressure canning usually results in a significant loss of liquid. That’s what’s going on the photos pictured at the top of this post. The jars were full, with only 1/2″ headspace when I put them in the canner, but a week later, they’ve shrunk. Cold vs. hot pack doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, so I don’t bother with heating up the tomatoes first. This is a perfectly normal side-effect of pressure canning and doesn’t affect the safety of the contents, but it freaks some people out. I wouldn’t necessarily give them as gifts. If you’re comfortable with a pressure cooker, though, this is by far the easiest and fasted method.

Long story short: You’ve got 3 basic options for canning tomatoes in water:

Water-bath raw pack: 40 minutes for pints, 45 minutes for quarts, be sure to add lemon juice
Water-bath hot pack: USDA recommends same time as for raw pack. Older instructions say 15 minutes for pints, 20 minutes for quarts. Use lemon juice.
Pressure-canned, hot or raw: USDA recommends 10 minutes at 10 pounds pressure for pints or quarts. Older instructions (use at your own risk) say 0 minutes for pints, 5 minutes for quarts (“0 minutes” simply means bring it to pressure, then turn off the heat).

You’ll need to process them longer if you’re canning in tomato juice. You can find more details and instructions at the National Center for Home Food Preservation. And if all else fails and you have a big freezer, you can just toss peeled tomatoes in freezer bags and call it a day. If you have strong opinions about tomato processing times, please leave your comments below.

You’ve heard about my gardening woes. Fortunately, not all is lost: I am growing a bumper crop of tomatillos. For the uninitiated, tomatillos are closely related to tomatoes, except that they’re green and grow in husks. The husks puff up when the plant starts to set fruit, and when the fruit fills the husk, they’re [...]]]>

You’ve heard about my gardening woes. Fortunately, not all is lost: I am growing a bumper crop of tomatillos. For the uninitiated, tomatillos are closely related to tomatoes, except that they’re green and grow in husks. The husks puff up when the plant starts to set fruit, and when the fruit fills the husk, they’re ripe. But because you need two plants for successful pollination, you could end up with hundreds of tomatillos if the conditions are right (they like hot days and cool nights). They’ve lovely roasted with fish or chicken, but my favorite? Salsa verde, by far.

I make a stovetop/blender version, but you if you want to go through the trouble of peeling them, you can make a nice smokey version by toasting the tomatillos and peppers in a cast iron skillet….but the lazy way is equally delicious.

Now, a little disclaimer about canning. All of the water-bath recipes that I’ve seen for salsa verde require more lime juice than I like in my salsa. On the other hand, they also use more onion, so they would be less acidic. I queried the Twittersphere as to whether it would be safe to can my version in a water-bath canner. Zoecancan sent me a terrific link to a peer-reviewed article in the journal Plant Foods for Human Nutrition that says that tomatillo mixtures with 50% or more tomatillos are safe for a water bath. Now, I want to be loud and clear here that this is NOT a USDA-approved recipe—but I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. Last year, without access to this information, I canned about a dozen jars in a pressure canner and they turned out just fine. You will get some discoloration on the lids because of tomato-family enzymes, but so long as the jar is still sealed, it’s harmless. If both of these options seem scary, you could always freeze it. It also keeps in the refrigerator for at least 2 weeks.

Salsa Verde

About a pound of tomatillos
Water to cover
1 onion
A couple of jalapeno peppers, or maybe a serrano or two
Enough cilantro to yield 1/4 c. chopped
Salt

1) Remove the husks and rinse the tomatillos. Put them in a saucepan with water to cover and bring the water to a simmer. Cook for about 10 minutes, until they change color and squish easily.

2) Combine the tomatillos and their liquid and all the remaining ingredients in blender.

If you’re freezing or storing in the refrigerator, you’re done. If you want to can it, proceed to Step 3.

3) Return the sauce to the pan and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, prepare your canning equipment. Gently boil your lids and have 2 quarts of boiling water ready for the pressure cooker, or a big pot of water going for water-bath canning. Water-bath canners need to sterilize the jars. Transfer the hot sauce to clean jars (water-bath canners need hot jars) and assemble the lids. Adjust the rings.

4) For pressure canners: transfer the jars to the pressure canner and pour in the water (Remember: the water will not cover the jars. It’s there to create steam.). Lock on the lid and turn on the heat. Evacuate the steam for 7 minutes, then put on the pressure regulator. Process pint jars for 5 minutes, quart jars at 10 minutes, either at 10 pounds pressure. There’s a step-by-step refresher on pressure canning on this post on chicken broth.

5) For water-batch canners: transfer the jars to the water bath. The water should cover the jars. Bring the pot back to a boil. Process pint jars 25 minutes and quart jars 35 minutes.

If you are a food scientist or home extension agent and have thoughts on this: Speak up! Also, this isn’t like jam: it scales up beautifully. If you’ve got 10 pounds of tomatillos and want to make 3 quarts of salsa: knock yourself out.