Pumpkin Time!

Good old LOGS (local overpriced grocery store) actually had a decent deal of for once in a blue freakin' moon: pumpkins for 19 cents/lb. For $2.53 I got these beauties:I spent yesterday roasting them up, pureeing the meat, and freezing the pumpkin in one and two cup portions. I got exactly 14 cups of pumpkin puree from these two pumpkins! Woo-hoo!I also saved all the seeds and roasted them, in addition to the seeds my roommate gave me when she emptied out the pumpkin she bought for Halloween. I decided to have some fun with the spices Palidor sent me in her care package recently. I made three different kinds of roasted pumpkin seeds (always a favourite snack of mine at this time of year!): curry flavour, using the curry powder Palidor's dad uses; Chinese Five Spice; and just plain salted.The curry ones smelled absolutely out of this world! They needed some help in the flavour department, however. I think these would be good on a salad or as a garnish. I can tell you, though, that I am so looking forward to making a real curry with this powder because the aroma blew me away. The Five Spice were OK...They also needed a bit of help. I think, in retrospect, I should have added some sugar to them. The salted ones were great!

Thanks again, Palidor!!!

Have a great Halloween everyone!

The Magical Fruit

This year is not only a bumper crop year for huckleberries, but my 8 bean plants appear to be on some kind of manic growing spree that is providing me with about 86 bazillion yellow wax beans. I am already sick of the sight of them. Yesterday alone I picked 1.25kg of the suckers, which is about 2.75lbs. It was the third picking - and there are so many more on the way.

The whole point of this garden is to help feed myself without depending on the grocery store, so obviously I had to do something to preserve my bean crop since becoming bored with them & letting them just rot on their stems would be counter-productive. So, I blanched & froze.

Bear in mind that I have no idea what I'm doing, OK?

Blanching involved boiling for a short period of time and then immediately plunging the veggie into an ice bath to stop the cooking process. The goal is to break down the cell walls of the veggie so that when the veggie is frozen, the water in the cells doesn't crystallize and expand, then rupture the cell walls, which is what causes a veggie to go mushy upon thawing.

So, here is what I did.

I washed the beans well & trimmed them. I then brought a large pot of water to a rolling boil and threw in a bunch of beans.After 2 - 3 minutes, I lifted the beans out & plunged them in an ice bath. (Yes, that is an ice pack; we have no cubes!)

Once the beans were completely cool... ...I packaged them up in small freezer bags, making sure to squeeze out as much air as possible, then I put the bags of beans in a larger freezer bag (double bagging like this helps prevent freezer burn). And into the freezer they went.

I suspect I'll be doing this a lot in the next few weeks...

Book Review: Well-Preserved

The flap reads: "Most of us remember our mothers or grandmothers painstakingly canning tomatoes or pickles outside on a sweltering summer day so they'd be able to grab them from the basement pantry come winter. But how can a busy person with limited time and space put up the seasons' delicious bounty to savor later in the year?"

The essence of Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved is summed up in the subtitle, "Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods." Bone herself lives in a small New York apartment, and if her book is any testament, she can pump out an incredible amount of stuff in a small, limited space.

Covering water bath canning, pressure canning, pickling, smoking & curing, freezing, and oil preserving, Well-Preserved covers a lot of ground in a slim volume. Bone's highly readable tone makes quite a scientific subject engaging and inspiring. Methods for these different types of preservation are well-laid out and the language is accessible. Her recipes look delicious and inventive. When canning time comes around this neck of the woods, I will for sure be making some of the recipes I've bookmarked, like the Strawberry Balsamic Jam and the Stewed Onions with Marjoram.

Bone structures the book around one master recipe, like the Strawberry Balsamic Jam, and then provides a series of recipes that use that one master recipe as a staple ingredient. There are a lot of cool ideas for everything from desserts and main dishes to salads and soups. As one might expect, there is a ton of variety.

So, I am very much looking forward to canning season (which is usually around the end of August in my family), though this book has some great ideas for non-canning preservation methods that I can totally see myself using. I am very grateful for my freezer, I can tell you that!