I planned to swing by Skillet Diner and pick up a jar of Bacon Jam for my brother Alex’s stocking, but I realized that I could probably make it cheaper, and then I would have more to give away. A quick search got me this recipe, which looked pretty good, and I was off and running. It is basically equal parts bacon and onions, cooked down for hours and hours with garlic, coffee, brown sugar, maple syrup, and vinegar to round out the flavors.

So how does bacon jam taste, you may want to know. I won’t resort to the superlatives that the other blog did about this stuff, but I will say it’s pretty tasty. It won’t change your life, but it would definitely improve a burger. When it finished cooking at midnight or so, I decided to test it with an egg poached in plastic wrap (testing a breakfast I was planning for the family getaway) and it definitely satisfied that late-night fat- and salt-tooth that I could really do without. Alicia said it was sweeter than she expected, but it is called jam, after all.

A personal note and disclaimer on bacon: I am not usually one to want to wrap everything I see in bacon. We do have a freezer full of it from buying half a pig earlier this year, though, so access isn’t a problem. However, this month I not only made bacon jam as a stocking stuffer, I also brought bacon-chocolate-chip-pecan cookies to a Cookie Exchange Party. And when I noticed that I was almost out of Bacon Salt (a stocking stuffer I received – and secretly mocked – last year), I thought, “I wouldn’t mind more of that.” Hmmmm…. I may need to re-examine the cool distance I try to maintain from bacon-obsessed dudes who are weaving bacon baskets to hold a dozen pigs sculpted in foie gras (or other ridiculous things…).

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We’re having a pre-Thanksgiving potluck with the neighbors tonight and I decided to make a pie with the sour cherries we got this summer at Paul’s parents’ place in Wenatchee. If I had room to grow a cherry tree it would be this kind; super tart and really only good for baking or jam.

When I thawed them out a ton of juice drained off, and I realized that I could do a batch of jelly alongside the pie. We had everything we needed in the basement (including the obscene amount of sugar that goes into jelly), and besides the processing time, it only took about a half hour to make 8 cute little pints.

Plus this was my first lattice-topped pie. Alicia accused me of showing off and I won’t deny it.

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We have a history of neglecting the fruits of our garden, and here is another instance. We grew a bunch of little delicata squashes last year, which were a bit of a pain to use because they were kind of petite. So down into the basement they went. We’re trying to pinch pennies these days, so in scouring the food storage, Alicia found them and decided it was time to make some risotto. They had changed colors from white with green seams to a golden yellow, almost like little pumpkins. Those things were over a year old, and still going strong… talk about staying power.

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Alicia has been making applesauce like crazy with the bags of apples that we brought home from Wenatchee back in October, and we have probably 20 or 25 quarts so far. I kept saying that I was going to make some apple pie filling since we just used up our last batch, but it’s been busy. Finally last night the Venn diagram of motivation and time overlapped, and I canned 10 quarts of pie filling. It looks like a good batch this time around; I followed this recipe (mostly, and despite the Comic Sans). Blanching the apples after they were peeled and sliced seems like it helped keep the whole production from oxidizing too much, though I had to run the sauce through the blender to de-lump it before pouring it in the cans.

A week or two ago, I also made some apple jelly with rosemary, which is an amazing combination of flavors. Rosemary usually overpowers things, but with the apple, the flavors are perfect together. We received a jar of this jelly from someone a few years ago and loved it, but I can’t figure out who it was. If you’re out there, reveal yourself! At any rate, it is tasty, tasty jelly, and it’s all Hannah wants on her toast for the time being. Just take any apple jelly recipe, and add a sprig of fresh rosemary after filling the jars, right before you put the lid on; the rosemary flavor infuses the whole jar.

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Our friend Lark just invited us to the most impressive dinner party the other week, inspired by a festival she ran into somewhere in Europe I want to say. Maybe France? Or Spain. At any rate, it celebrated the late-season root vegetables and hearty greens that are still around, nearly forgotten in the garden. She and her sisters-in-law cooked probably 10 different dishes, served thali-style, and it was absolutely incredible.

I was doing some late-fall putting away of the garden this afternoon, and came upon three artichokes that were still OK. Inspired by the Feast of the Forgotten Vegetables, I tossed them on the porch to bring inside, though I will admit that in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Those will sit in the crisper for a few months before I throw them in the compost.”

We just let our artichokes bloom this year, partly because the purple thistle was so pretty, and partly because I was for some reason intimidated by the spiky things. This is our second year growing artichokes, and until tonight, we’d never cooked them. But after the kids went to bed I wanted a snack, and there they were.

Boiled for 20 minutes. Melted butter with lemon. Seriously, these were the best artichokes I’ve ever had. Surprisingly tender. But seriously, as a side point, who figured out you could eat those things? “Ok, now you’re going to scrape inside of the very bottom of the leaf off with your teeth — no seriously, it’s good.”

I’m on board. No more letting them blossom for the color, we’re eating them from now on.

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I teach color theory every spring, and when we talk about color psychology I always say that blue is an appetite suppressant because there are no naturally occurring blue foods. I’ll have to add an asterisk to my lecture next semester. We grew these blue potatoes this year, and when they are mashed, they make the most impressive blue color. They get a little more purple when they’re heated up.

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More canning… I really don’t know how this all fits in with everything being so busy these days. We brought back a box of beans from Yakima and pickled them. My grandma made these and I loved them as a kid, both the regular dill ones, and the spicy ones with red pepper flakes in the bottom. My mouth is watering just thinking about them now.

I’ve been doing a little bit of design work for Panacea, an awesome dinner delivery service here in Seattle. I am all for getting paid in food, especially when it’s this tasty. They did house-roasted beef sandwiches earlier this summer, and it came with a really good Tomato Jam, with big slices of ginger in there. I used the leftovers on egg sandwiches, a burger, and shamefully, straight from the spoon. So I took a shot at approximating it with the Tomato Preserves recipe in my trusty Ball Home Preserving bible. It’s close enough and will have to do… until I can get them to pass along the secret recipe.

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Every August we spend a weekend in Yakima picking up (and u-picking) produce to preserve for the coming year. The first year we went may have been pre-children, and I think a couple other times we managed to leave them with the grandparents, but by now it’s become a full-blown family vacation. There is the hotel with a pool, Mexican food for dinner, the quirky winery we go tasting at, and of course our favorite places to buy produce.

This year we made quick work of the tomato fields, picking 140 pounds in 20 minutes or so. Even when the tomatoes are 35 cents a pound, they end up costing quite a bit when you get 4 huge boxes full. When we got home and realized what we’d done to ourselves… the project was pretty daunting. The first half of the batch we peeled, pureed, and cooked down to a really tasty pizza / pasta sauce (the recipe in the photos is what we added to each stockpot of sauce after it had reduced by about half.

The second half of the batch we peeled, chopped, boiled, and canned as stewed tomatoes; it was a lot less work and we put those away as quarts rather than pints. All told, we ended up with about 25 pints of pizza sauce and 25 quarts of stewed tomatoes. The best part was getting that bucket of tomatoes out of our fridge.

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Back in July we were invited to tag along on another orchard gleaning out in Wenatchee (we did apples last fall) at Peter and Maryann’s and we ended up with a significant quantity of Rainier cherries, plus a couple bings thrown in for good measure. Apparently the Rainiers were  being selectively harvested for just the right size and color at the end of the season, and a bunch were just going to be left to the birds. Dodging rain showers, Paul, Michaellynn and I spent a couple hours up on ladders filling bags.

Alicia had the foresight to get on Amazon and buy the highest-rated cherry pitter she could find, and we put it right to work. We were going to be pretty busy with a home-improvement project, so we froze them in gallon bags until we would have a chance to work on them.

(Time passes… one month to be exact.)

OK, I’m back and have finally started processing the cherries. Michaellynn had suggested freezing the cherries before drying them because when they thawed, they would release a lot of their liquid, which she made into jelly. We followed suit, and indeed, each gallon bag of cherries drained about a quart of liquid. After that it was into the dehydrator for about 16 hours, and we had what looked like giant raisins on hour hands. I reduced down the cherry liquid into a thick syrup, and we’re trying to decide what to do with it. Probably keep some for pancakes, and maybe make a bit of jelly too?

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In the precarious, cold, wet months when we’re starting seeds, transplanting the seedlings, and hoping the plants take root, a lot of things can happen. This year I find myself with three yellow crookneck squash plants, and two of them are starting to produce pretty heavily. These are yellow squash pretty similar in taste and texture to zucchini, so we have a decent idea of what to do with them, but we’re still scrambling to stay out in front. Alicia made squash quickbread and squash risotto the other night. Last night she wanted to try open-faced squash Parmesan sandwiches, so I got to work.

I sliced the biggest of our crop into 1/8″ planks, and marinated them in some balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and smoked paprika. After a half hour or so, it was onto the bar-b-que with them, monitored closely so they didn’t get too soggy or overcooked. I made plenty so there are leftovers for lunches.

To finish the sandwich, the squash was placed on grilled sourdough, then topped with marinara sauce and Parmesan cheese, and broiled to brown them. Robbie was convinced they were pizza sandwiches and ate it right up, but Hannah decided she was back to being a picky eater and cried about dinner. You can’t win them all, especially where squash is concerned.

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The little crabapples out in front of the run-down church next door are ready to go, so Robbie and I filled up a basketful yesterday. The sauce they make is really tart, but the batch we froze last year was perfect as a base for pie filling, adding either apples or rhubarb. The first batch today made 7 pints of applesauce, and I have the rest prepped to cook down tomorrow, hopefully for another 5 or 6 pints. That should get us through to next year in pretty good shape. Though pies have become my go-to potluck dish, so I think we’ll also do some apple pie filling this fall.

I got a little artsy with the photos this time, just to warn you. Here’s to steamy August nights in the kitchen.

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My mom used to make biscuits for breakfast all the time, and we’d have them with butter (let’s be honest, it was margarine) and jam or honey. Then I went off to college and the one thing I still miss from the Fairhaven dining hall is their biscuits and gravy, which I think were usually available on the weekends. Despite these fond memories, I rarely make biscuits these days.

Enter the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago. Like most weeks, one of the first things I read on Sunday morning is the recipe in the magazine, and it happened to be about biscuits, so I cut it out and pinned it to the fridge, which in the past has meant that Alicia will have to recycle it when I’ve forgotten about it in about 6 months.

But I woke up (or rather, was woken up by a baby) early today, and after finishing the last 25 pages of the book I was reading, I was ready to face the day, starting with a fresh batch of biscuits. You can get the recipe here, and the only change I made to the easy recipe was I did all the sifting and mixing in the food processor, instead of getting a bowl dirty too. The sausage gravy looks awesome as well (and the recipe features the instructions to cook “until its flavors are gathered close”, which is awfully poetic for a truck-stop specialty.) But I think the full biscuits and gravy assault on my arteries is best attempted on a weekend.

Breakfast today was equal parts nostalgia and the New York Times, a perfect description of most of the things I love, and it makes me laugh at the person I try so hard to be.

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There have been a couple ingredients that have been languishing around here, causing me all kinds of guilt. One was a bowl of porcini mushrooms (King Boletes) that we foraged out near Leavenworth when we went camping a week or two ago. I owe you a post about those, by the way. The other was bok choi that’s been ready for at least a month in the garden, and was starting to flower.

Finally today, we woke up to a bit of rain after a string of 8o° days, and inspiration hit. I decided to make some mushroom and bok choi miso soup with rice noodles for lunch. It hit the spot, used some food up, and the kids even ate it.

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Awhile back on this blog we wrote about the revolution that was the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day .  It was a great change of technique that really improved our bread making.  However I still ended up buying or making a lot of our sandwich bread because I prefer whole wheat bread – it just makes me feel like a better mom.  Enter Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.  A new (ish- I am little late to the table with this one) book by the same authors that includes 100% whole wheat, sandwich bread and many enriched breads.  I’ve checked it out from the library twice and am now thinking I will just buy the darn book so I can always have it around.  It makes a really nice sandwich bread and I am anxious to try some of the other recipes in the book.

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Our strawberry patch is doing MUCH better this year, having been hooked up to the main watering system.  Even with this improvement though there is no way we can grow enough strawberries for the jam we need for the coming year.  Luckily we are close enough to local u-pick fields to make acquiring strawberries not too difficult.  This year Hannah and I went to Harvold farms in Carnation, WA.  This is a no-frills farm that charges $1 a pound.  I was hoping to get 20 pounds, but my co-picker’s steam ran out pretty quickly so I settled for 13.

With this I managed to make 6 batches (30 cups) of Dan’s favorite freezer strawberry jam.  We actually had enough berries for a couple more batches, but we don’t want to run out of freezer space this early in the season.  Besides if we can’t make 30 cups last a year we may need to take our jam consumption down a notch. We’ve already enjoyed crepes with jam for breakfast today and now have plenty to last us a year, plus a gallon of frozen berries and a 4th of July strawberry shortcake to boot.

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Last year was the first time I went morel mushroom hunting, and Jared and I did OK for a first try. Over Memorial Day weekend this year, I decided to head out east to a clearcut off 97 between Cle Elum and Leavenworth (which is as close as you’ll get from me, unless you’re a blood relation, in which case I might tell you which Green Trails map it’s on. And this is for a pretty mediocre patch).

With 2 kids in tow, I was only hoping to find a few and leave it at that. Which is exactly what happened. I found exactly 15 morels. Which I was pretty happy with. The sausage leek mushroom pie was delicious, but maybe not worth all the time and gas it took to track them down.

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There were a few random daffodil and tulip bulbs in the front bed of our house when we bought it that I thought we’d managed to dig out last year to make room for vegetables. But this year another one popped up, and kept growing and growing. I finally needed the space for the things I’m actually going to grow there (cherry tomatoes) so I decided it was time to dig it out.

As soon as I pulled it out of the ground, a garlicky-oniony scent overwhelmed me. Turns out it wasn’t a flower, but a leek, and an enormous one at that. Just about big enough to be a new child in the family, with a fine head of hair (look at the picture if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)

Our asparagus patch has finally started bursting, and I figured out that the lard I rendered last year makes the most wonderful pie crust, so a leek tart with asparagus and feta was in the cards. Yum.

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Yes, weeds in the plural, dandelions to be specific. Hannah and I were out on an errand, and I was telling her about a recipe for dandelion bread that I had just read about (in Langdon Cook’s foraging book Fat of the Land – anybody seeing a trend here? However I can guarantee I won’t be diving down to the bottom of Puget Sound to spear lingcod anytime soon.) Of course she was delighted by the idea of cooking with flowers, so we kept our eyes out for a good patch. We found some huge dandelions out beside a sketchy Chinese restaurant and filled the only vessel we had handy – mom’s hat.

Back in the kitchen, the process of picking the yellow petals from the flower head was a bit tedious, but got easier as I refined my technique. I needed to get a full cup of them, which was no small feat, and Hannah lost interest pretty early on in the project. The bread was a basic quickbread, and the dandelions only seemed to add color (though a lovely color it was), and apparently also a ridiculous amount of vitamins. The flavor was pretty plain, and next time, I’d add some cinnamon, or maybe lemon zest. Fortunately we had some tasty lemon curd from the Bent family pantry, and it made the perfect accompaniment.

I’m also thinking that dandelion petals could go into pancakes or scones just to sneak in a little extra nutrition and interest from the kids, but only when I have an extra half hour to kill. The recipe is after the break.

Dandy Bread / Muffins
From Fat of the Land by Landon Cook
Adapted from Peter Gail’s The Dandelion Celebration

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dandelion petals, greens discarded
1-1/2 cups milk
4 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup canola oil
1 egg

Combine dry ingredients with dandelion petals. In a separate container mix together the liquid ingredients. Mix into dry ingredients and stir to just combined. The recipe said to bake at 400°; we did mini-loaves and they scorched a little bit. You might want to try 375°. Mini-loaves will take 20 – 25 minutes; a full loaf will take a bit more.

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I have a favorite route home when I’m coming south on I-5 that is not the fastest way to get here. It involves getting off a couple miles early and taking a winding road through Interlaken Park, which is down the hill from our old apartment. I have very vivid memories of riding my bike through the park our first fall back in Seattle, listening to the new Iron and Wine album on my iPod, and heading off to teach color theory at SPU.

I was taking the same route home the other day, and the road through was blocked off. Something strange came over me, and instead of taking the detour, I parked the car and hopped out to take a look around, wondering if there had been a big landslide. I also had an ulterior motive in the back of my mind – I’ve been reading Langdon Cook’s book about foraging around Seattle called “Fat of the Land” (I know, another blogger with a book that I’m obsessed with), and I’m on the lookout for a nettle patch. As I was walking around, I didn’t find any nettles, but another topic from his book came to mind. Fiddlehead ferns. After a little investigation, I figured out what types of ferns produced fiddleheads and which didn’t, and after that, it was easy to find them.

I took a couple heads from each newly blooming fern (do ferns bloom?), because apparently if you take them all, well, there won’t be a fern there next year, and gathered a handful. Tonight I got around to cooking them up (blanched for a couple minutes, then sauteed in butter), and they were nice and tasty, kind of like asparagus, and apparently full of beta carotene. Plus, I had a little bit of nettle pesto left over from Zack and family’s recent visit mixed into some homemade pasta from the other night to pile them on. Not to brag.

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We planted beets right before our big family vacation last June, and they straggled and struggled along all summer. I never got around to using them in the fall, and actively began ignoring them come winter. They survived some significant week-long freezes, and a couple good snows to boot.

I finally decided to pull them up and see if there was anything worth saving, and it turns out that beets are pretty darn tough in the ground. We cooked up a batch of golden beets for a salad a few weeks ago, and today I pulled out the fancy candy-cane striped Chioggos to roast for Robbie’s 3rd birthday party. After paring off the gnarly skin from the tops, they look as good as new.

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I know in some circles I’m the last train to leave this station, but I recently ran into the blog Orangette. Fabulous photos, the perfect tone with the writing. (Which is why it’s super well-known, and she’s written an even more awesome book that I read half of last night, and why I’m kind of beating a dead horse here.) But to the point… I ran into a recipe for overnight yeasted waffles. A couple posts back I wasn’t necessarily blown away by the cheese I made… it was as it should be, at least, but nothing beyond that. Not so with these waffles. They were unlike anything I’ve ever had; in a normal waffle maker (not a Belgian one) they crisp up and almost entirely and dissolve in your mouth. And the kids cleaned their plates at breakfast, which has not been a pattern of late.

They may not be for everyone – Alicia prefers a cakier waffle and thought these were more like a croissant than a waffle, but said they were good (in that way that meant “good for you to make for you and the kids when I am not at home”). And I am thinking that they would be good with sourdough starter instead of regular yeast (Zack, can I have some more? I killed the last batch.) But seriously, try these, you won’t regret it.

Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles via Orangette with blueberry syrup from last summer.

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My mom wanted to make cheese for her birthday, but the day of the party she took ill so everything was called off. That didn’t change the fact that I still had 2 gallons of milk in the refrigerator (one of which was fancy raw milk from Vashon, which seemed like it might go bad at any moment, since I bought it with bright orange $2.00 off stickers on each half-gallon. Which still meant it was $5.99 / half gallon by the way. Yikes.)

Anyway, I got to the task a couple days later, and followed the instructions from this website. It all went relatively smoothly (despite the fact that yes, that is a thermometer for people, not cheese, normally), and it took close to 3 hours start-to-finish. I was pretty impressed with the final product, arrived at through a combination of kneading curds and microwaving them for short bursts. The finished ball of cheese bears an uncanny resemblance to pizza dough.

However, it is only partially satisfying when you basically make something that tastes like what it’s supposed to taste like… I wasn’t expecting transcendent cheese, but for all the effort it too, it should be something special. It tasted good, and it’s going to make awesome pizza, but I don’t see putting this project into the weekly rotation.

I ended up cutting it up in chunks and putting in a container with some of the leftover whey to keep it fresh. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do that, but it seemed to make sense.

The bonus was that you could boil the leftover whey at the end (which looked like about 90% of the volume I started with) and strain that to make a small quantity of ricotta. And I mean small… maybe a 1/2 cup. But something’s better than nothing.

Some postscript notes:

1. It turned out that storing the cheese in the whey was a bad idea; it just got soggy. I’m not sure what the difference between that and the little balls of mozzarella they sell in the store packed in liquid, but I think it may have to do with the fact that it was cut up, rather than formed into a ball.

2. The preferred method of storage after the initial soggy cheese debacle was to wrap them in a slightly damp rag and store them in a ziplock bag. They stayed at a nice consistency that way until I got around to making some tasty enchiladas.

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The potatoes in the drawer have been getting a little out of hand, but since we grew them ourselves last year, it seemed like a shame to throw them out. So they are back in the ground as of this afternoon, long, scary tendrils and all. I used the same containers I made last year (a garbage can cut in half) and the old glass recycling bin that used to hold herbs. I did one container of purple potatoes from our drawer, one of Yukon Golds from our drawer, and one bag of seed potatoes from Lowe’s. We’ll see how each type does.

The technique I’m using for growing them is something I read awhile back – you plant them in a shallow bit of soil, and as the plants grow, you keep adding dirt to bury them more and more. It seemed to work OK last year, though toward the end it got a little hard to add dirt with all the leaves growing on the plants.

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We tagged along with our friends Clay and Michaelynn on their annual “Cider Weekend” at their friends’ orchard in out in Wenatchee this weekend. It’s a gathering that’s been happening since they were all in college, where the orchards are gleaned after they’ve been picked, cider is pressed, taco soup is consumed, and all manner of farm fun is had. Our kids ran wild through the apple trees all day, got pushed on the huge swing, and ate more apples than I thought possible in the course of an afternoon. Plus, do I need to say anything more than “apple baseball”?

The main event was the cider pressing, and after a morning of picking apples, we got to work processing them into juice with the Ringsrud family’s fancy cider press. The previous weekend, we had our annual cider pressing here in Seattle, and in hindsight, it was a quaint affair compared to the raw power of this machine, squeezing nearly every last drop out of the apples it pulverized. In a couple hours we pressed more cider than everyone could even take with them.

To top it all off, the family has recently kicked their artisan hard cider business into gear, producing some fantastic bottles from the apples they grow in their orchard. Look for Snowdrift Cider… you won’t regret it. I think Whole Foods is carrying it in the Seattle area.

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I was on such a canning kick early last week dealing with the blueberries and tomatoes.  Unfortunately it wore off quicker than I would have hoped and I was left with piles of tomatillos, corn and peppers and no motivation.  I shoved the corn and peppers in the fridge, but left the tomatillos on the counter thinking I would be reminded that they needed to be dealt with ASAP.  I managed to avoid looking at them until I noticed a gooey substance leaking from the bag.  I opened the bag and was horrified to find hairy mold growing.  I felt my big plans for a year’s worth of green salsa (my favorite) as well as the money we spent on them going into the compost pile.  I thought I might be able to salvage a few so I put on my industrial rubber gloves and attacked the bag.  I was happy to find that I only really lost 3-4 tomatillos and was able to salvage enough for a respectable batch of salsa.  I roasted some peppers from Yakima and followed another recipe from the well used Ball canning book and I have to say I am happy with the results.

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Wow.  We had quite the harvest today.  Dan has been out of town camping the last four days. With him gone I did not have the time to harvest much from the garden each day, so the cucumbers got a little out of control (those guys grow fast!).  In addition much of our long awaited produce has finally reached ripeness – squash, pumpkin, tomatoes, etc.  We haven’t had a ton of yield for most of the summer, which I am sure is related to the things we chose for the garden as much as it is to the terrible summer weather.    Now we are finally enjoying some bounty.  We need one of those Thanksgiving horns for our table or something.  The squash should keep well for a while, the larger tomatoes will be dried in the dehydrator  for “sun” dried tomatoes packed in oil (we just used up last year’s crop this week), but we will need to deal with the other things in the next few days.

Fall Harvest

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Its been a very mild (some would say non-existent) summer in the Northwest.  Add to this the fact that tomatoes are notoriously hard to grow here anyway and I am surprised we have anything to show from our tomato starts this year.  We had good luck last year growing our tomatoes in the hoop house.  This year, however, not much has grown out back, but we’ve had great luck with the cherry tomato plant in our front bed.  Who knows why it did so well.  We assumed it got a lot of radiant heat from the concrete stairs behind it, but what to we know?

Its great to be able to go outside grab a handful of tomatoes when a meal arrives.  I actually do not really like raw tomatoes (shudder, gasp – gardener treason!) but my kids love them.  Tonight for dinner I grabbed a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes and a bowl of blackberries (courtesy of our neighbor’s out of control bushes that are trailing over the fence) and had dinner.  Of course the protein of tonight’s dinner was frozen chicken nuggets, but no one’s perfect right?  Anyway it seems everyday there is another harvest of tomatoes to serve up and we may have permanently found a new place for our heat loving plants.

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Getting desperate for blueberry uses, I turned to the index of the trusty Bell Complete Book of Home Preserving that Alicia mentioned in the last post. Blueberry Bonanza? Spreadable Blueberries? Blueberry Nectarine Freezer Jam? I opted for the Blueberry-Basil Vinegar.

Just mash together equal parts white wine vinegar and fresh blueberries, add some basil, and put it in a jar for a couple weeks. The jury is still out on whether this is a good idea… Alicia is looking at the fruit flies buzzing around it disapprovingly.

Blueberry-Basil Vinegar

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In addition to tomatoes we picked blueberries as a family in Yakima.  It was the end of the season and the field wasn’t really even open, but one of the workers let us pick after warning us there was not much left.  We were impressed by his sense of “not much” since we had no problem filling two large buckets in about 30 minutes.  That doesn’t even include the dozens eaten by our kids.  The best part was that he only charged us $1 a pound.  We picked 10 lbs and have been eating them steadily, however it was clear we were going to need to do some preserving.

We approach canning for a practical standpoint.  Whatever will attract the most fruit flies is attacked first, hence the tomatoes canned on Sunday.  Blueberries are the next priority.  Yesterday I made a blueberry pie (with lard crust) and today it was syrup.  We are so overloaded with jams and jellies I am having to try different ideas for fruits.  Pancakes are a regular breakfast food around here so I figured syrup would get used up fairly quickly (like before next summer).  It’s also pretty easy.  Just crush and boil blueberries, run them through a food mill and then boil again with sugar water.

I used 8 cups of blueberries and got 5 pints worth, which seems pretty good. I used the proportions in the Ball canning book which I recommend.  We got it from the library last season and I added it to my Christmas list soon after.  Its a great book for coming up with ideas and it has all the basic info you’ll ever need as well.   Tomorrow I may make blueberry juice or I might  just freeze the rest for winter cobblers.

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We took our annual trip to Yakima this weekend to taste wine, stay in a hotel with a pool, and buy a bunch of produce. Our favorite place to buy veggies over the last few years has been Imperial’s, who have a new, larger location this year, right next to their fields. We picked tomatoes and paid 25 cents a pound… that’s over 40 lbs. of tomatoes for $11.00. Plus, as the pictures show, the kids got a kick out of the whole thing.

We got home, and knew that if we waited, the project would loom over us all week, so we dove right in, canning them less than 12 hours after we picked them. We cooked down a bunch into a thicker sauce for pizzas, and canned the rest of them raw. The only downside to that method was the 45 minute processing time required for uncooked tomatoes.

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