Crock-Fermented Dill Pickles

This is my second year making crock dills in cooperation with my friend Cathy, who lends me the crocks her grandmother used.  The cukes come out of my gardens, as well as the peppers.  This year’s dill came from my friend Amy’s garden, and the garlic is Patti’s from Evergreen Farms (certified organic).

The recipe comes from Putting Food By–the little cucumber crock pickle recipe.  Because I started later this year (not thinking I was going to make them, and having a friend who had a little crock to fill with the early season cukes), I used the smaller 3 gallon crock this time.  The 5-gallon crock was devoted to the Concord grape wine project.

You can actually leave the pickles in the crock and eat them out of it over the winter.  But because I split the pickles between Cathy and me, and because it’s just easier to have the jars of pickles on hand, I can them.  I sterilize the quart jars and pack them with pickles, then strain the brine and heat it just to boiling before pouring it over the cukes.

I’m generally a bit short of enough fermenting liquid to can all of the pickles, so I add a brine of 3 cups water, 3 cups vinegar, and a third cup of pickling salt to that brine to make sure there’s enough.  The vinegar I added this year was 1 1/2 cups each of white and cider vinegar.

Because of the late start this year, and because I was picking those cukes very small like I like them, I only ended up with 9 quarts of pickles this year.  But they are gorgeous, and they are tasty.  Luckily, I have one quart of last year’s pickles left to eat, and a few leftovers from this batch too before I break into my share of this year’s dilly goodness.

 

Crockpot Pork Shoulder Roast

Last night’s local feast featured a pork shoulder roast from our friend Nate, mashed potatoes made with Gary Bye’s Pontiac reds and local (Burbach’s) milk, plus some applesauce I’d canned last year from an abandoned apple tree in the neighborhood.

The roast was maybe three pounds, bone-in, and it was still a little frozen from having just been taking out of the freezer the night before.  I sliced some onions and layered them on the bottom of my crockpot, put the roast on top, then whisked together a sauce of grainy mustard, crabapple jelly (my own, of course), and a little veggie stock.

The sauce got poured over the top of the roast, and I cooked it on high for maybe four hours, then turned to low for another hour or two.  If your roast isn’t frozen, you might turn it down sooner.  I did baste the roast a couple times, and I turned it over about halfway through cooking, but you can pretty much leave it alone if you want.

When I served it, I ladled a little of the sauce with onions over the top of the potatoes–just a little for flavor, as it was pretty fatty from the meat cooking in it, and I didn’t want to try to make gravy.

The crockpot is my go-to for dinner when I’m busy with work, but know I’m going to want something hearty for dinner at the end of it all.  I’d never made a pork shoulder before, but I like that mustard flavor with virtually any pork product, and the addition of fruit is always good, too.

I would definitely make this recipe again–H must have said “Mmm” about seven or eight times in the process of eating it.  That’s all the encouragement I need.

 

Later ‘Mater

Clearing out the last of the tomatoes, so I can move the wire rack I’m holding the excess produce on back into the sunny bedroom window for the houseplants (which is its main function).

I had three pint boxes of ripened red pear tomatoes, plus a couple peach lugs about half full each of red and ripening fruits.  Those all got cleared out, and now I have a tiny wire basket with maybe four or five not-yet-ripened tomatoes left.

That’s it for the fresh tomato season.  It’s over.

All those red ripe tomatoes went into the smaller stockpot with ingredients for a small batch of soup.  I won’t be canning this batch (the fact that most of the ‘maters have been separated from their vines for weeks makes me leery)–we’ll just eat some fresh and maybe freeze leftovers if there’s enough.

It’s bittersweet.  I hate to let go and accept the fact that winter is coming, but it’ll be good to get my living room back.  I’ve still got bags of onions, several winter squashes, and baskets of peppers to use up or move downstairs, but those things will keep relatively well in their raw form.

Next canning project is either applesauce (though my friend had a great idea to make and freeze apple turnovers a la our spanikopita adventure) or pickles.  The crock-fermented pickles in the basement are pretty much ready to go.

And judging from last year, I should be starting to get next year’s seed catalogs soon!

 

Back to the Canner

I’ve taken a few week hiatus from the canner as I work on my courses and get the house in shape after the growing season.  But I did buy a big box of apples at the farmers market, and I’ve had my mind set on chutney ever since I got them.

My attitude toward chutney might make a traditional Indian cook wince (I don’t know, not having met any recently).  My idea of chutney is simply a whatever-seems-good melange of fruits and vegetables in a spicy brown sugar and cider vinegar sauce spiked with ginger and a little hot pepper.

If that’s not your idea of chutney, my apologies.

I had planned to make a green tomato-apple chutney with a friend, but her tomatoes rotted, so I had to come up with some other mix.  Yesterday afternoon in the supermarket, I saw they’d recently got in some nice-looking big fennel bulbs and that seemed promising, so I picked one up.

Too, I had a bag of organic lemons in the fridge, some onions, sweet and hot peppers, crystallized ginger–all wonderful things to throw in the pot.

The lemons got in cut in half the long way, then sliced thinly, peel and all (no seeds).  Then fennel was also sliced into thin crescents along with a couple yellow onions, and I added a couple minced cloves of garlic.  The base was 3 1/3 cups of cider vinegar and about 1 1/2 cups brown sugar. I threw in a cinnamon stick and some ground chipotle.

I was going to cut the sugar really dramatically from the Putting Food By recipe, but settled for half the sugar called for in that recipe–I like tangy, but my initial super-conservative sweetening was a little too tangy.  Now it’s about right.

Once all the other veggies were in the pot (except the peppers), I started peeling, chopping, and adding the apples as I went.  If you do it this way, some of the apples kind of melt into the sauce, while the later-added ones retain some of their firmness.

In the end, the thing looked a little too brown, so that’s when I used the red and green peppers.  They added some nice color and a good counterpoint to the sweetness.

My favorite part of the chutney is the lemon peel–so tender, but still lemony-tasting in the sauce.  The whole thing is such a great combination of sweet and tangy and spicy that I have to rein myself in from sitting down and eating a pint of it with a fork.

But there was about a half pint left over, and that jar may be emptied before H gets home tonight.

 

 

Eatin’ Good in the ‘Hood

There’s no question that my neighborhood is home to more than its share of excellent cooks.  Whether its Jason of the weekend breakfast bonanza or John of the sourdough loaves and chocolate chip cookies, or (if I do say so myself) my local food fetishism.

Shall I just come right out and say it?  I’ll bet I eat better than you.  Maybe not as elaborately as you; maybe not as expensively as you, but damn, we sure do eat well around this house.

I’ve been making heartier fall meals lately–the weather is cooler, and even though I’ve been spending way too much time inside staring at a computer screen, I have managed to burn some calories walking the dog down to the park in the afternoons to justify the meals I’ve eaten and am going to tell you about in a moment. But first, Vega.

Vega is no lap dog.  Well, she will be if you let her, but her 94 lb. body is a bit big for sharing a spot on the furniture.  She’s also a devil on a leash–as well-trained as she is to stop (most of the time) at our borders when chasing cats out of the yard, I’ve never gotten her to heel worth a darn.

As a result, walking her generally required a visit to the chiropractor the next day. But I picked up this slick $10 no-pull harness the other day, and it’s amazing what a good dog she is.  The improvement in her good dogginess is almost as big as when I finally broke down and got a flip-top trash can.

Anyhow, besides sitting in front of my screen and walking the dog down to the park yesterday, I also managed to make an amazingly good root soup.  First, I chopped and roasted carrots, celeriac, parsnips, and a couple small onions with cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic powder, marjoram, salt and pepper with some butter and EVOO.

Then I caramelized another small onion and a handful of sliced leeks before adding several diced potatoes to the pot along with a stock made from the leek tops (I am drying the rest of the leek bottoms).

Once I’d cooked the potatoes to tender perfection, I stirred in the roasted (and slightly caramelized) roots, then pureed the whole thing with a bit more leek stock.  I threw in a dollop of yogurt as well, and added a few more of the same spices as I saw fit.

The result is a hearty soup of an almost porridge-like consistency–perfect for fall and winter evenings and for lunches on days (like today) when you finally drag your sorry butt outside to rake the leaves and do the fall clean-up (along with the summer clean-up you never got to).

Local ingredients: my parnsips, carrots, celeriac, leeks, and onions; Gary Bye’s Yukon Gold potatoes.

But wait! There’s more!

Tonight seemed like a good night for a hearty and slightly more complex meal–I spent much of the day out doing yardwork, and I wanted something special.  Knowing I still had a little ricotta cheese in the fridge, and knowing we haven’t eaten pasta in awhile, I decided on a lasagna.

The sauce was made with grassfed beef, my home-canned tomato sauce, and a few veggies–sweet red pepper, celeriac leaves, onions.  I added herbs, of course, and cooked it down to a not-to-thick consistency (because I was not cooking the pasta in advance).

The cheesy layer was the leftover ricotta, plus a dollop of plain yogurt, a forked-apart chunk of Dimmock Dairy’s cheddar-blue cheese, and a few rounds of cooked squash that didn’t fit in the freezer bags, and an egg.  I used Bionaturae organic whole wheat pasta.

I added a little red wine & water around the sides before I put it in the oven, and had it covered with foil for the first forty-five minutes or so to cook the pasta.  The first fifteen minutes, I cooked it at 425; then I turned it down to 350 for the last forty-five.

Not only was this tasty tonight, but the leftovers will be great for lunch tomorrow, when it’s actually supposed to be pretty warm out–meaning I’ll be back messing around in the yard instead of indoors cooking.

Local ingredients: my tomato sauce, celeriac leaves, peppers, basil, onions, squash; Dakota Harvest’s grassfed Dexter beef; Dimmock Dairy cheese; Justice’s egg; Evergreen Farms garlic.

And yes, there’s still more.

Even though I threw a little squash (Neck pumpkin, actually) into the lasagna filling, I still had a bit left.  I didn’t think I could tackle a whole pie tonight after everything else I’d accomplished (or didn’t, but at least started), but custard is easy enough!

Into the blender went 2 eggs, about 3/4 cup milk, and maybe 2/3 cup squash, plus various spices.  And now it’s–OH Crap!  I Forgot the sugar! Just a minute…(yes, please take this time to chide me about my bragging above)

OK, NOW it’s cooking for maybe 45 minutes at 325 in a water bath in the oven–luckily it wasn’t cooked enough yet that I couldn’t whisk about 1/3 cup sugar in there.  Whew!  If I hadn’t been typing this, I wouldn’t have remembered!

The custard is going to go alongside a little scoop of not-local-at-all Hagen Das Fleur de Sel caramel ice cream.  If you haven’t tried it yet–don’t.  I don’t want anyone else eating up all the best ice cream in town.

Local ingredients (in the custard): my squash, Burbach’s milk, Justice’s eggs.

 

Simple Late Summer Casserole

In tribute to the BlogHerFood 2009 convention in San Fran (which I am missing here in SoDak), I’m whipping up a late-summer casserole of thin-sliced zukes, tomatoes, sweet red peppers, and shavings of yellow onion.

It’s a pretty simple prep and a lovely dish: oil the casserole with EVOO, then start slicing–grating a bit of Asiago between every few layers–a little salt and pepper, some rubbed-between-the-fingers dried oregano. I started the bottom layer with zukes, as they’re the most stable.

You can use your food processor to make it quick n’ easy, but tomatoes don’t tend to survive that process well and peppers are kind of ungainly to go through the chute, so I just did it all by hand.  It’d be worth breaking out (and cleaning) the food processor just for the zukes if I was doing more than one.

Once it was all layered and lovely (I did three layers–could’ve done twice that), I drizzled a bit more EVOO over the top, covered with foil, and am baking at 350 for 30 minutes or so (I turned on the oven when I put it in).  Once the timer shouts, I’ll pull it out of the oven, pull off the foil, and heat up the broiler.

The topping will go on then–a mixture of fresh sourdough breadcrumbs, grated cheese (I had to switch to Parmesan–out of Asiago), and a little EVOO and back into the oven it’ll go to brown on top.  Yum!

 

Shorter Days

Back from the farmers market and all unpacked.  The sun was setting as I headed home at about quarter after seven, having torn down and packed up what was left of a pretty good day of sales.

The produce left over was only enough to pile a small basket full, and now it’s on my kitchen table to go into meals and maybe a few more canning projects.  That went next to the other basket of produce on the table–mostly sweet peppers that started turning red in the field, and are finishing up in the safety of the house.

It’s now pitch dark at just a few minutes to eight, and I’m waiting for H to arrive, so we can decide what supper looks like.  Despite the day full of fresh produce, most Thursday nights are for eating out.

I’m not overly exhausted tonight and could probably cook, but Raziel’s has live music under the courtyard lights–there won’t be too many more Open Mics before the weather turns frosty to enjoy Ed, Michelle, and all the other locals who come to play.

While I don’t do it every week, I passed along a fair amount of my sales money to other vendors today–Patti was selling her certified organic red onions for a buck a pound, and I bought eight pounds.  They’re a bit small this year (last year they were gargantuan), but that’s OK–they’ll roast a bit faster under the balsamic glaze at this size.

I also got my usual ten bucks worth of garlic–some for planting but most for eating.  The stoneware bowl on top of the fridge is getting full, but I don’t doubt that’ll be gone far before the green garlic shows up at market next spring.

Bob Corio at Dakota Harvest Lamb advertised that this is his next-to-last market before the final on October 22nd–so I also passed some cash his way for ground beef and lamb, summer sausage and brats.  I’m on his mailing list, too, but it just seems safer to get the freezer as full as I can while he’s right on the scene.

I always wonder why more folks don’t stock up the way I and some of our other vendors (and a few customers) do.  It’s dribs and drabs–a few peppers here, a couple tomatoes there.

When I get a customer that says, “give me all the rest of those peppers–I’m gonna stuff and freeze them,” I feel a sense of camaraderie.  They know the winter’s coming, and they’re not going to be a total slave to whatever’s shipped from the Southern hemisphere to fill the grocery store shelves that week.

I also have to laugh at the ladies (it’s usually ladies) who come to the market, walk down the row of vendors, and say, “oh, I’ve got plenty of that,” and “I’ve got more than I need in my own garden.”  Sometimes I wonder why they come when they seem to already have everything we’ve got, but I like that they do come–even just to chat.

We keep watching the forecast–all of us, and the rumors of a frost “next week,” or “in two weeks” are starting to surface.  So far, the forecast for the specifically foreseeable future doesn’t go below the mid-forties at night–we’ve got a little ways to go at least.

But the fair-weather crops of summer–the eggplant and tomatoes, at least, are dropping off in their production, and the winter squashes and pumpkins are showing up in bulk now.

It won’t be long, dear readers–it won’t be long.  Fill your pantries and your basements and keep those home fires burning.

Whether it’s a heavy winter or a mild one–winter is coming nonetheless, and there’s nothing quite so fine on a blustery, icy night than realizing there’s no need to go out in the cold–everything you need is right here at home.

 

Today at the Market

Today I’ll be bringing tomatoes (mostly paste/sauce–the season is ending for tomatoes!), sweet bell peppers, relleno stuffers, and Hungarian Hot Wax peppers.  I’ve got several boxes of the little mixed cherry toms as well–and I DID pick the Coyotes today, so they’ll be in the mix.

For greens, I’ve got spicy mustards (only a couple bags!), chard, and two big bags of basil for pesto (the temps are dropping–make and freeze your winter supply soon!).  I might have one or two bags of lemon basil as well–depends on whether I get to my second patch before market.

The Marvel of Venice yellow beans will be there, and I’ve dug a few bunches of the venerable big Blue Solaise leeks for sale.

What else?  Oh, I’ve got a small basket of the little green Asian eggplants, and a big basket of young n’ tender summer squash of various varieties.  One bag of okra was all I managed out of the patch this week–but it’s a bigger bag than last week’s, and it’ll be on the table.

There’s also a good-sized basket of the Asian burpless “Summer Dance” cucumbers that are so popular this year, and there’s bound to be a few other surprises on the table as well.

For what others are bringing (as far as I’ve been told), go to the Vermillion Area Farmers Market blog.

 

Autumn: Soup’s On!

Despite my marathon tomato-soup canning seminars of late, the point of those sessions was simply to deal with the excess of produce and to put it by for the later, colder months–not to eat on a present-day basis (though H and I did eat the last of the second batch for breakfast this morning).

But the weather is changing, and the days are cooler and overcast.  It’s time to make soup, as the kids say these days, for realz.

I’d dug a couple of leeks from the garden a few days ago, and those went simmering into butter in my stockpot.  Rummaging through my crisper drawer, I found a couple of early-dug parsnips that I thought I might try to enter in the Clay County Fair, but couldn’t find three that were uniform enough.

Add to that some carrots I got from Gary Bye at the farmers market (I haven’t dug mine yet, and I don’t think there’ll be many), a sweet pepper that has been sitting in the basket on my table, turning red, and celeriac leaves for a nice flavor.

Then the potatoes–I’ve been storing up potatoes for the last couple of months–some of my fingerlings that will have to be eaten in a short time, then Gary’s Yukon Golds for mid-term storage, and his red Pontiacs for long-term storage.

This soup got a dozen or so of the Yukons–unpeeled and chopped with just the eyes pared away.  It’s now all together and simmering on the stove–by dinnertime, the veggies will be meltingly tender and the flavors will have developed fully.

 

Fates are Sealed

So, I checked on the tomatoes today and realized that every tomato in the house was dead ripe.  About thirty pounds.

Don’t worry–I picked more–though they’re still in the back of the truck as of this moment.

It’s Tuesday, and although I could do the Elk Point market today, I haven’t really been able to sell tomatoes there besides the boxes of colorful cherry toms and a few big, pretty heirlooms.  It’s also crummy weather for good sales at a farmers market.

So, considering that the vines are going downhill fast and there won’t be too many more big harvests this season (if any more), and considering that we thoroughly slammed through the one jar of soup that didn’t seal from the last batch, it’s tomato soup-making time again.

I’ve got the peppers, onions, basil, and celeriac leaves in the pot, simmering down to tenderness.  I’ve got the first batch of tomatoes residing in cool water in the sink.  I’ve made myself a cup of Russian Caravan tea, and I may make another.

Last night, when H was getting ready to make a small grocery run, I asked him to pick up another case of quart jars.  While he was gone, I located another close-to-full case of empty quarts in the basement, and when he came back, he brought with him two more cases instead of one.

It’s cool and overcast, with the threat of rain ever-present on this autumnal equinox.  Good smells are starting to waft through the house. Time to start washing tomatoes and putting them through the strainer.  This may (really!) be the last time this season.