You Grow Your Own Food? Harvest 7-7-12 and some processing

Got a good squash harvest. Decided we had enough to can a quart of pickles. Found enough time to brew up a Graff.

Squash, basil, and raspberries.

Refrigerator pickles

Graff, mildly hopped and malted cider

Applesauce and Scrumpy.

My wife purchased a huge box of bruised apples for next to nothing, so we have started processing them. Today I made spiced applesauce out of 10 pounds of them. I picked out 10 pounds of Jazz Apples Jazz Apples for this batch. I peeled then cored them, saving everything. I used this Recipe Spiced Apple Sauce loosely and filled some saved cans as well as standard canning jars. This won’t last long and some will be given away so we chose saved cans so we don’t worry about getting them back. I then took the peels and cores and ran them through the food processor and placed them in a stainless steel pot with some water, a handful of raisins, and some washed English Ale yeast I had. I don’t know what the OG is and won’t measure the FG so I won’t know the ABV. It hopefully will come out as a light and tasty ciderish beverage and it cost $0.

The big box of apples we got for pennies a pound. A mix of Jazz, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, and Empire.

My apple peeler.

My apple corer.

Apples in the pot ready for some heat.

The peels and cores.

Sugar and spices added to the cooked apples.

Hand mixer smoothing out the applesauce.

The jars getting ready for applesauce.

Filling up the jars.

Washed English Ale yeast, shaken up.

Running the peels and cores in the food processor for the scrumpy.

The finished applesauce, cooling. We lost one jar that didn't seal but opened in the water bath. The remaining survived and all the lids popped down.

You Make Your Own Foods? Process day 10/15/11

Busy afternoon processing foods to put in storage. We made applesauce, apple peel and core jelly, started fermenting apple peel and core cider vinegar, roasted squash, and saved squash seeds for toasting today. Kitchen was a disaster but well worth it.

Grand Totals
Apple Jelly
5 jelly jars
6 pints
6 quarts
Applesauce
7 quarts
Apple Cider Vinegar
To be determined
Roasted Squash
2 quart bags pureed
big bowl waiting to be pureed
3 acorn squash frozen halfs

Roasted Squash

Applesauce

Apple Jelly

Apple peels and cores ready for gift 2 then 3

Squash Seeds

Apple Cider Vinegar

A full stovetop!

Apple Jelly

No artificial colors added

Applesauce in front of the jelly

All natural applesauce, nothing but apples and water

You Grow Your Own Food? Harvest 7/31/11 and Pickles!

Yellow tom, grape toms, cherry toms, beans, cukes

14 jars of pickles: kosher dill, bread and butter, dilly garlic

You Cook Your Own Food?: Thousand Island Pickles

Used Grammy Hurd’s Thousand Island Pickles recipe to process some pickles today.
The Recipe

Thousand Island Pickles
Ingredients:
4 quarts ripe cucumbers, peeled and hollowed out then cut in cubes
3 Cups vinegar
6 medium onions sliced
1 Tablesppon salt
2 Teaspoons tumeric powder
4 Teaspoons mustard seed
2 cups sugar

Procedure
Combine all, top up with water if not covered, cook for approximately an hour, until almost soft. Can as you normally would.

Fermenting again, this time we’re making pickles!

Sliced some of the cukes

Speared some of the cukes

Stuffed the cukes into glass jars with dill and pickle spices, just waiting for the brine and weights

All ready to start fermenting!

Pickles

Bean Canning July