When you get a sudden bug up your butt to do something, you gotta roll with it, especially on drizzly days that keeps you inside. This past weekend, my bug apparently came in the form of Ball jars that were begging to be filled!
Friday started off with a 4.5 lbs cabbage that turned into 4 pints of fermenting sauerkraut. Kraut was the first recipe I tried back in September, when I first started learning about food preservation, because its so ridiculously easy. The hardest part is waiting the 3-4 weeks for it to ferment!
Ingredients: cabbage, canning salt and your hands!
Prep time: about 30 minutes
Fermenting time: 3-6 weeks, depending on the size of the container (these 1.5 pints shown here are done in about 3 weeks)
Check out the recipe here as well as how to can it once it's done fermenting if you chose.
(Note: sauerkraut can last a few months in a fridge without canning! We kept our first batch in the fridge for about 2 months before cooking and it was great!).
Saturday was chicken broth day, after letting an organic chicken carcass simmer on my cooktop in a pot of water for about 36 hours. We just throw in some salt, pepper and celery (if we have it), and let it simmer on low for at least a day. Once all the meat has fallen off all the bones, it's done. We like to throw in a few chunks of chicken into each jar to keep the flavor going, but you don't have to.
Fun Fact: Do you know the difference between stock and broth? I didn't either but the almighty Google says apparently broth is made from meat and vegetables, while stock is made with bones.
Sunday was bell pepper day: red, orange and yellow ones. I had water canned peppers once before only to discover you can only pressure can vegetables, due to their low acidity. (Pressure canning heats at higher temperatures necessary to sanitize appropriately than water bath canning does, which is used for higher acidic foods like fruits and jams.) We ended up using the first batch pretty quickly for some soup and again for fajitas so they wouldn't go to waste.
3 out of 4 jars sealed in Sunday's batch, and I think it might have something to do with the fact that I didn't pack enough peppers in to make them fit tightly enough. (You can see in the picture at the right they all floated to the top while canning, and then lowered back to the bottom as they cooled, but it shows how much extra space I had. Haha, oh well... live and learn.) The 9 or 10 peppers I used could've easily fit into 3 jars, but I like to do batches in 4's or more just in case one accidentally gets sacrificed to the canning gods.
Recipe for pressure canning peppers is here.
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Garden Planning Update:
We started seedlings on the 26th for this year's Spring garden: artichoke, zucchini, Dragon carrots, chives, dill, cilantro, basil and Roma tomatoes. These guys all take longer to mature, so we're staring them first and the herbs we plan to keep indoors for use all year. We'll start our second batch of different seedlings this weekend hopefully, then our third batch in early March and tweak from there.
The idea is to try our hand at "succession planting" throughout the season, rotating out the older crops with new ones. That way we'll have a constant supply of food coming in (in theory), instead of 2 or 3 giant harvests all at once like we did last year. We plan to extend the garden from 2 raised beds to 5 in order to accommodate everything. Now that we know how to preserve our fruits and veggies, I'm really excited to see what we will accomplish this year! Here's to green thumbs!
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