Patrick's Irish Pickles

We had finally amassed enough cucumbers to justify a canning attempt, so I broke out my dad's pickle recipe. We then proceeded to drive all over Tempe in a frustrating effort to find a water bath canner. My advice to you if you ever find yourself in a similar situation: try the dinkiest, local-est hardware store you can. After we tracked down the supplies and I brushed up on canning techniques I went out and cut some fresh dill from the garden:

Next I got out all the herbs, spices, salt, and vinegar (I don't know if this recipe is supposed to be some sort of family secret, so until I get dad's permission I won't post it on here.)

Canning is pretty simple, as long as you are careful to follow all the steps. If you are slapdash you risk broken cans, unsealed lids, and botulism (no fun). First we put a brine mixture of water, vinegar, and salt on to boil, and boiled the jars, lids, and rings. Meanwhile we washed and sliced the cucumbers and garlic.

Next we put the spices in the jars and loosely packed in the cucumbers. My father warned me not to pack them in too tight because you can crack the jars otherwise.

We only had a small cucumber crop, so we used pint jars instead of quart jars. After we packed in the spices and cukes into the (hot) jars, we poured the hot brine mixture in. Apparently headspace (the amount of air left at the top of the liquid) is important, and I'm afraid I may have left too much air. We'll see.

While the jars and brine are still hot, wipe down the jars, work out any air bubles, and fit the lids on. Loosely cap with the rings, then lower into the water bath on a rack and put on the canner lid. It's important to never shock the jars by putting cold jars into hot water or hot jars onto cold surfaces. Unless, of course, you like shattered glass everywhere.

steamy

Once the water came to a boil I started the timer and let the cans cook for 10 minutes. Next, we carefully removed the jars and let them cool off for several hours. The lids made nice "plink" noises and appear to be concave and well sealed, so hopefully the cans are all right.


All in all, it was a good first try; we got four pints out of that batch. Nate was very helpful for the whole "lifting pots of boiling water" part, and it seems like something that's a lot easier with two people. Any suggestions on what to can next time?

More garden space

We decided, after struggling to harvest cucumbers, that our current garden beds were too small and crowded, and that we might as well go ahead and build another one. This one is twice the size of the other individual ones: three feet wide and eight feet long. First we assembled the supplies:

1. Lots of dirt

2. Two by tens


3. Corner brackets and screws


We just screwed everything into a box frame, and then made a simple cage of furring strips and bird mesh.


It's filled with dirt now and planted with seeds, but I haven't gotten around to taking pictures of it yet. I'll post them when I get a chance.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving day was very warm this year. It was bright and sunny and in the upper seventies before noon. Early in the day I finished up the pies, and roasted the squash. All you do is melt some butter (margarine, in this case) in a pan with brown sugar, honey, and a little salt, pepper, and ginger powder. When that's all melty you add the squash chunks, mix it all up so the squash is coated in the butter and spices, and then roast it for an hour at 400 degrees.


After the squash is soft enough to pierce with a fork, dump it and all its juices into a large bowl and mash it until it's the consistency you like. I made this early in the day, and then reheated it just before dinner. Yummy!

Since it was a holiday I decided to use my great-great-grandmother's dishes. We don't use them that often since I worry about breaking them, but I do like to get them out for special occasions. I don't know how much Nate likes it, though, since they have to be hand washed and he does the cleaning up.



Besides pie and squash, we also had green beans, mashed potatoes, rolls, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and turkey. The gravy turned out pretty good this year; I think using the roasting bag helps with the juices.



Our friends Dylan and Rebecca and their toddler shared Thanksgiving with us. Finn and the baby entertained (terrified) each other for much of the afternoon:

The remains

Thanksgiving Vanguard

Time for the pre-cooking to begin! Our first order of business was apple pie, essential for those who can't/won't eat pumpkin pie (I'm looking at you, Nathan). I used one of my favorite recipes from the excellent Baking in America, by Greg Patent. I'm not normally that into apple pie, but this is just delicious. I'll include directions here if anyone wants to try it.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 lbs finely sliced apples (use several kinds)
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c brown sugar
3/4 tsp cinnamon
3 tbs flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbs lemon juice
2 tbs cold butter (cut in small pieces)
2 tbs cream or water
extra sugar
double pie crust


First you (rather laboriously) peel and slice all the apples. I used five different kinds: Granny Smith, Braeburn, Jazz, Jonagolds, and Jonathans.

my lovely assistant

You need to have two and a half pounds of sliced apples. We had extra, which I froze and saved for later. Next, I juiced a lemon. You can used bottled juice, but lemons were on sale and this is an easy step so I went with the fresh stuff. I made more than the recipe called for since I planned on freezing some of the apples and didn't want them to turn brown.
Mix the lemon, sugars, cinnamon, flour, and salt into the apples. I used my hands to mix since I wanted to have everything evenly distributed. If you want you can mix the dry stuff together first to help with this step. I was lazy and didn't want to have to dirty another bowl.

After everything is all mixed dump the ingredients into your pie crust, mounding it up in the middle. Place the butter evenly on top of the filling and brush the edges of the crust with water.

Put the second crust over the filling, sealing down the edges, trimming off any excess, and fluting the edge. Brush the top with water or cream and sprinkle with sugar. Use a sharp knife to cut a six-line spoke pattern on top. Bake on a cookie sheet at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, then at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Cool for several hours before serving.
I'll post pictures of what it looks like baked tomorrow!


I also had to prepare the squash. Butternut squash is delicious, but also a pain in the butt to peel and dice.


I'll roast it on Thanksgiving morning. Look how much I have:

Persimmon Pudding

Know what these are? They're persimmons! Persimmons have a very mild, almost creamy flavor. There's two kinds of persimmons; one kind is sort of acorn-shaped and has to be almost rotten before you can eat it. This type (Fuyu) can be eaten right away, but it has kind of a tough skin. They were on sale very cheaply at the Asian market, so I bought a bunch and promptly forgot about them. I decided to use them up by making some persimmon pudding.

First, scoop out all the pulp from the skins.


Next, I assembled all the ingredients. Because I had twice as much pulp as the recipe called for I doubled it. This was a little troublesome since you are supposed to mix everything in the blender, but I figured it out. I blended (blendered?) as much as I could, and then beat in the sugar and flour separately.

Once you've blended everything smooth, you just pour it into a buttered baking dish and bake it for half an hour. In this case, since I doubled the recipe, it took a bit longer.

It's an English-style pudding (more like a cake) rather than the custard-type that we associate the word with in America. It's good, but would be better with ice cream or maybe some larger fruit chunks mixed in. You could somewhat taste the goat milk in ours, but if you aren't allergic to dairy and can use regular milk that shouldn't be an issue. If you want to try making it you can find it here. If I make it again I'll save some extra persimmon, cut it into chunks, and mix it into the batter.

More quilt work

I've been going back and forth on what pattern to use with my quilt. My first idea is this:

My second idea, and the one I'm more inclined towards (for simplicity's sake) is this one:



I think that I should go with the zig-zag one because I've already started piecing strips together, and because I have fairly limited experience with piecing triangles. The other quilts I've worked on have either been all squares and strips, or free-form crazy quilting. I don't have pictures of the other quilts, but I can show you the crazy quilt:



My crazy quilt is very slow-going since it's very dependent on what cloth I can get. I lucked out and got a lot of gorgeous fabric remnants from the costume shop at school during my undergrad. The lovely costume ladies let me take anything that was too small for them to use. This is one of those projects that will probably take ten years to finish.

And in other news, look at what we grew for dinner!

Crafty

I thought I'd share some of my non-food/gardening activities. Sadly, most of what I've been working on is for Christmas and can't be shared until after the holidays. One thing I've been making (very) sporadically is a small quilt/wall hanging (we'll see how I feel when it gets bigger).


I started out with seven yellow fabrics and seven blue fabrics, and then cut each one in half. One half was left as it was, and the other half went through a bleach-discharge bath. I did this in my pre-blog days, and apparently I forgot to take pictures. Basically I just filled up a big bowl with water and a small amount of bleach, swished everything around, let it sit for varying amounts of time, and then rinsed really well. Everything was also run through the washer just to get the last of the bleach out.
Those two blue triangles in the center are actually the same fabric; the one on the right has been bleached. It was interesting to see how the colors changed, and it doubled the amount of color I have to work with. Here's the overall pattern I'm going for:

I like it so far. Oh, and as promised, a shot of my cucumbers. This guy was hiding from me in the foliage, and I only discovered him today. the little shriveled alien-thing hanging above it is actually a baby cucumber, so you can see the size difference.

Harvest

Today marked my first harvest from my garden. Ready for the bounty? Here you go:

Very... bounteous... huh? To be fair, I got this much off of maybe six plants, and they have tons of unripe beans left to finish growing. I really wish I had the resources to have a bigger garden. Unfortunately, the dirt here is absolutely awful. Because it's a desert, the soil is basically hard-packed dust with almost no organic matter in it. It doesn't hold water, it's a pain in the butt to dig into, and it has almost no nutrients. In order to get anything to grow, we had to build raised beds.


They are about four foot by three foot wide (yes, I know that's not grammatically correct, but it's how Dad would say it) and ten inches deep. The wood's not too bad; the expensive part was the dirt. Thus, I only have two beds and everything's packed in tight. I think if I could have twice the amount of wax bean plants we would have enough beans for dinner at least once a week for quite a while. Ah, well. Someday we'll live someplace where I can have a proper garden.

My second harvest (which only partially counts since I bought the seedlings after my own were killed by bugs) provided enough to have for lunch.

The lettuce is going crazy. That second picture up there is from last week- things are getting even more crowded in there now. I'll have to go take some pictures tomorrow to show you guys how big the cucumbers are getting.

Tomorrow- persimmon pudding? We'll see. And maybe even some non cooking/gardening updates!

Autumnal Groceries

Today was my day to run errands and try to catch up a bit on housework before tomorrow's homework and class marathon. We sold one of our (many) cars over the weekend, and since I didn't want to go to the dentist with hundreds of dollars in cash on me, I thought I might want to go to the bank. One bank trip, dentist visit, post office stop, and grocery run later and I am pretty much set (barring a last minute pie crust/margarine run) until Thanksgiving!

My grocery store of choice is Sunflower, because they have the BEST prices on produce. Seriously, you can get almost everything plant-based at least 30% cheaper than at the regular store. They also have a lot of organic, local, and environmentally friendly stuff, as well as a huge selection of bulk dry goods. I get all my sugar, flour, and split peas from their bulk section. They always have weekly sales, and on Wednesdays they overlap. I know already that I will miss Sunflower when we move back east.

These lovelies are for Nathan's Thanksgiving apple pie. The trick to a great apple pie is slicing the apples thin, and having at least three different kinds. I have Braeburn, Jazz, Jonagolds, Jonathans, and Granny Smiths in that picture. I can't wait to see how it turns out!

While I was picking everything else up, I grabbed an extra can of pumpkin and some dark chocolate chips for muffins. Here's all the ingredients:

First you mix all the wet stuff together.

Then all the dry stuff. If I were to do it again I would switch the bowls and put the dry ingredients in the bigger bowl, since it's better to add the wet to the dry, instead of the other way around.

Mix it all up, plop it in your muffin tins, and pop it in the oven.

Wait 20 minutes (or longer if you're talking to your mother on the phone and your timer doesn't go off) and you'll have two dozen muffins all piping hot with gooey chocolate. If you'd like the recipe you can find it here: Pumpkin Muffins.

See? Gooey chocolate.