Cherry harvest 2016

As in previous years, I rented (sponsored? adopted?) a couple cherry trees over in Cove.  I have two trees in my name, because for the past couple years, my original tree hasn't produced very well.  Last year, I got a total of 65 pounds of cherries off the two trees combined.

This year, I got 138 pounds of cherries off the same two trees!  Wow!

I gave away 20 pounds to Emma's friend who came to help us pick, and kept the rest for us.  I dehydrated most of them (80 pounds, turned into 10 quarts), used about 10 pounds to make 4 quarts of juice, and put the rest in the freezer.



The cherry pitter earned its keep again, as did the steam juicer.  At least one quart of that juice is destined to become a batch of cherry jelly.  I've never made cherry jelly before- cherry jam, yes, but not jelly.  The steam juicer is a fabulous thing.

It's a lot of work to pick and pit them all, but I love having organic cherries on hand.

Final canning and dehydrating of 2015

Well, 2015 is winding down.  Here's my last batch of food preservation for the year:



Left to right, that's

• five pints of dehydrated cremini mushrooms
• eight pint-and-a-half jars of cranberry juice
• two quarts of dehydrated homegrown tomatoes
• eight quarts of amazing turkey stock
• one pint-and-a-half jar of turkey meat with the last bit of stock

This is the first time I've dehydrated mushrooms in a couple years.  The first time I tried, it wasn't successful at all.  The mushrooms dried fine, but they are so hygroscopic when dry that they started rehydrating immediately just from the humidity in the air.  I tried storing them in Ziplocs, in jars, and in Ziplocs IN jars.  Nothing worked to keep the moisture out, and they got leathery and floppy within a couple days, and moldy within a month.  Very disappointing.

This time around, I immediately sealed them in jars using the vacuum sealer attachment of my FoodSaver.  This worked brilliantly.  A week later, and they are still crispy dry and rattle in the jars.  Success!  I love my FoodSaver.

The cranberry juice is the leftover liquid from making dehydrated cranberries (which are still finishing in the dehydrator, but I estimate there will be three pints). I prepared the cranberries by boiling them in water until they popped, then soaked them in an orange juice and honey mixture for an hour to sweeten them before dehydrating.  The cooking/sweetener liquids had too much good flavor to waste, so I mixed them and canned it up.  Yum!

The tomatoes, well..... I'm still processing tomatoes.  You can see in the background of the pictures that I still have garden tomatoes ripening in my dining room, and I've been dehydrating them as they ripen.  I think this is it, though.  We're getting ready to go on vacation for a week and a half, so the last batch that's still not quite ready to dehydrate will be bagged up and tossed in the freezer.  I'll probably sauce them some time after we get back.  Not bad, to still have fresh garden tomatoes at the end of December!  I am officially calling my 2015 tomato harvest a RESOUNDING success.

The turkey stock is also a first for me- the first time canning it, anyway.  I've been freezing stock for years, but I'm out of room in my freezer and am delighted to have pressure canning in my arsenal now.  This batch of stock is one turkey carcass from Thanksgiving, one chicken carcass from several months ago, and four steak bones from some point this summer, plus a big bag of mixed veggie trimmings collected over the past few months.  I was cleaning out the freezer, obviously!  The stock is gorgeous and flavorful, and I'm very excited to have it on hand.

I did the single jar of turkey meat because I had 3/4 pound left over from the batch I got out to make soup the other day, and I knew it wouldn't last in the fridge until we got back from vacation.  So I jarred it, added the last bit of stock that wasn't enough for a full quart, and topped it off with water. Easy peasy, and ready for another batch of soup.

Canning and dehydrating is so satisfying.

Turkey soup and BreadOnSunday

It was blustery today, with snow showers off and on all day, and I felt like making soup.  I never got around to making turkey stock after Thanksgiving, just pulled all the meat off the carcass and tossed it in the freezer along with the bones.  Today I pulled out the package of bones and did up a big pot of stock.  I'll can most of it, but took out some to make soup for dinner.

This soup is entirely from my food storage shelves and freezer: dehydrated corn, peas, celery, carrots, and potatoes, half of a 1-pound package of frozen turkey meat, and homemade stock.  Not shown are the home-grown dried thyme and oregano, home-dehydrated onion and garlic powders, and frozen grated ginger.



The recipe was so easy.  I just put two cups of stock plus two cups of water into a pan, threw in a scant handful of each of the veggies, the chopped turkey meat, a tablespoon-ish of the thyme, oregano, and ginger, and a hearty dash of onion and garlic powders, simmered for 20 minutes until the potatoes were rehydrated, and voila!  Dinner is done, with enough left over for my lunch tomorrow.



And because it's Sunday, we had already made bread earlier, which went great with the soup.  The pineapple was dessert.  Yum!

Home made dinner

Today I gave my KitchenAid stand mixer a workout.  First I made bread, trying out a new recipe from the interwebs.  It's a basic white bread, but has a great balance of density and airiness, with a nice texture.  I think the recipe is a good place to start, but next time I'll add some whole wheat flour because I'm not really much of a fan of white bread.



Then, since it was SNOWING,



I decided to make pasta.  I had 22 eggs that a friend had given me a little while ago (from her own chickens), and I knew that there was no way that we would be able to eat them all in time unless I made something with them, considering that Emma doesn't like eggs unless they're hidden in something and she can't detect any cooked-egg texture.

So I took 4 eggs and made a double batch of plain narrow linguine with just white flour, which works out to about 8 servings for us.  The KitchenAid pasta roller attachments are just so slick!



That was so fun that I took 6 more eggs and made a triple batch of narrow linguine with half semolina flour and half white flour.



Those 10 eggs gave me about 20 servings of pasta.  I put 18 of them in the dehydrator, and cooked two of the semolina bundles for dinner (and had a bit left over, so that "two serving" portion was really more like three).

Home made pasta, home grown and canned tomato sauce, home made bread, and grocery store frozen peas that I dehydrated in August 2014.



Yum.

As Emma was eating her pasta, I was astonished and a little taken aback to look over and see that she was actually teary.  I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she couldn't believe that we made all these things ourselves, and the pasta and sauce just tasted so good.

If that isn't a proud moment, I don't know what is.

Just in case you were wondering, five pounds of carrots can be washed, trimmed, and sliced/shredded in approximately 5 minutes, using the spiffy attachment for a KitchenAid mixer.



And five pounds of sliced/shredded carrots exactly fills a nine-tray Excalibur dehydrator. Four trays of sliced, five of shredded.



Just in case you were wondering.   :-)

Oh, and Chris asked in the comments for my last post if potatoes are cooked before dehydrating.  Yes, you have to cook potatoes first otherwise they turn purply-black, which is not at all appetizing.  I just blanch the pieces for 3-5 minutes in boiling water, depending on how big the pieces are- you don't want them so done that they're mushy and falling apart, just cooked through.  Lots of things don't have to be blanched before dehydrating (these carrots are raw), but potatoes definitely do.

Well it has been a while, hasn't it?  I seem to have lost my blogging mojo.  It's been about all I can do recently to keep up with Emma, work, and everything else.  I have been spinning some, but not much else fibery.  If I can get my act together, I'll take some pictures of my finished yarns, because they're very pretty.

Tonight, though, all I had the energy to do was take a picture of my dinner.  I was getting hungry this afternoon along about 5:00, so I wandered into the kitchen to see what I could find.  Sadly, the grocery elves have been slacking recently, and stocks were low.  Funny how that happens.

However, I do have a good store of dehydrated foods.  I also found a can of salmon, and that got me thinking.  From my seemingly bare fridge and pantry I was able to make a FANTASTIC dinner of salmon and corn chowder.



Everything in this recipe except the milk was a stored food, even the cream (frozen when it was on sale around Thanksgiving).  It was wonderful to browse my dehydrated food shelves and have lots of options.  Corn, potatoes, hmmm, how about some carrots?  Ok, peas? Not this time.  Onions, parsley, garlic, yep.

It was relatively quick, too.  From idea to bowl was just under an hour, and that included the soaking time!  Actual time in the kitchen was much less than an hour, since everything was pre-chopped before dehydrating.  Except for sauteing the onions, it was literally just throwing things into a pot and waiting for the magic to happen.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Salmon Corn Chowder
4-6 servings

1.5 cups dehydrated corn
3 cups water
---
3 T dehydrated onion
1/2 cup hot water
1 tsp bacon fat
---
1 cup dehydrated diced potato
1/3 cup dehydrated sliced carrot
1 T dehydrated chopped celery
1 T dehydrated parsley
1 tsp dehydrated chopped garlic
4 cups chicken stock (home made, frozen)
---
14 oz (1 can) salmon, drained and crumbled
1 cup milk
1/3 cup heavy cream

Add the corn and water to a large stock pot and soak for about 20 minutes.  At the same time, add the hot water to the onion in a bowl and rehydrate for 15 minutes.  Drain any excess liquid from the onions into the stock pot, and saute the onions in bacon fat until tender.  Add onions, remaining dehydrated ingredients, and chicken stock to the pot.  Bring to a rolling boil, then cover, reduce the heat, and simmer for about 20-30 minutes, or until all vegetables are cooked and tender.  Add salmon, milk, and cream.  Heat through, stirring well.

A couple days ago, I put a request out on my local Freecycle website to see if anyone had herbs in their garden that they weren't going to use before everything froze.

Today, I got a response.  "Come on over," she said, "I have some parsley and maybe some oregano."

Well.



That, my friends, is a pound of oregano, a pound and a half of parsley, three and a half pounds of dill (OMG so much dill!), a pile of cucumbers, a zucchini, some peppers, two eggplants, and a handful of basil.

I didn't even know herbs could be measured in pounds.  Both dehydrators are full and I haven't even gotten to the parsley yet.

I love Freecycle.

Ta Da!!  My new dehydrator came on Thursday, and it is so cool.



It's an Excaliber 9-tray model.  Look at all this space!



I love that there's no hole in the middle of each tray.
I love that I can check the trays without unstacking and restacking the whole darn thing.

I don't love that it has a larger footprint than the Nesco dehydrator, but I do love that it's shorter than the Nesco 12-tray stack.  There's a perfect spot on top of my washing machine where it can live permanently.



The capacity of the Excaliber is actually only half a square foot larger than the Nesco with all 12 trays stacked.  However, when the Nesco is fully loaded, it takes FOREVER to dry, and I have to rotate the trays top to bottom multiple times to ensure that everything dries evenly. Plus, filling the square trays is so much easier than filling the round trays (no center hole!).

So here's the first couple batches out of the Excaliber:



This is...

• 5 pounds of shredded potatoes
• 2 pounds of dry raw black beans, soaked and cooked
• 1 pound of dry raw garbanzo beans, soaked and cooked
• 1 1/3 pounds of fresh carrots, shredded
• 2/3 pound of fresh carrots, sliced
• 1 bunch of celery, sliced

I think this may possibly be the first time in my entire life that I've used up a whole bunch of celery before it went bad!

The reason I cooked the beans even though they were already dried and very store-able, was so I can use them in camping meals or quick soups.  Now they just have to be rehydrated by adding boiling water, rather than cooking for an hour.

I currently have a gigantic 100-ounce jar of spaghetti sauce on 7 trays, merrily dehydrating away.

Oh, yes.  I am indeed having fun.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been having fun with dehydrating.  These are the results from the past couple weekends:


Left to right, this is:

• tomatoes (about 5 each fresh red and yellow tomatoes, chopped and drained)
• peas 'n' carrots (2 pounds frozen)
• green beans (2 pounds frozen)
• peaches (15 pounds fresh)
• black beans (two 15 ounce cans, drained and rinsed)
• ground beef (3 pounds when raw, thoroughly cooked and drained)
• brown rice (1.5 cups raw rice, cooked)
• peas (3 pounds frozen)
• sweet corn (4 pounds frozen)
• green peppers (10 large fresh)
• apples (10 large fresh)

Except for the peaches, which were dried in August, all that was done in the past three weeks.  Of course the dried fruit is a favorite, and I must always have dried apples on hand.  In addition, I've also made a couple recipes for lightweight dehydrated hiking food (beef, rice and veggie variants) and they've been great.  Even approved by Emma!

I really like dehydrating.  I sometimes have a problem with not using up fresh produce in time, and it kills me to throw out food that spoiled.  I buy produce with great intentions, but then I'm too tired to cook, and I end up never making whatever it was I bought that great bunch of beets for.

Over the years I've learned that I do better with frozen veggies, since they have a longer lifespan.  I'm not much of a fan of canned veggies, except for navy and other shelled beans and corn and tomatoes.  Canned green beans and peas?  Ick.  Frozen, however, is usually almost as tasty as fresh.

The problem is that I have very limited freezer space.  Just the one on top of my fridge, and a small chest freezer (five cubic feet).  That space gets filled up fast when frozen veggies or meat go on sale.  Right now, most of my refrigerator's freezer is taken up with frozen cherries and peaches from July.  The chest freezer is mostly full of blueberries, chicken, and pork that were on sale last month.  Freezers run on electricity so I really don't want to buy a bigger one.

Dehydrating not only solves the spoilage issue, it solves the space issue.  And there is no energy cost associated with storing this food, other than the initial electricity to run the dehydrator.  The jars just sit on the shelf.  That big bag of frozen corn (not to mention the rest of that pile of veggies) would not have fit in my available freezer space.  Now that four pounds of corn fits in a single quart mason jar.  Huge space savings!  And since I discovered yesterday that the corn rehydrates beautifully, I feel great about that purchase. 

My summer adventures in dehydrating more than fruit started out as a way to make lightweight hiking and camping food rather than buying the pricy (and tasteless/salty/chemically) commercial freeze-dried meals, but I think it may morph into a more everyday thing as well.  Dehydrated food obviously doesn't always have the same texture as fresh, especially for fruits, but it's great as long as you pick the right recipe.  I would never expect a dried cherry to be the same experience as a fresh one, or even a frozen one, but dried cherries are better in oatmeal.

Anyway, I think there will be much more dehydrating in my future.  Coincidentally, I may or may not have bought myself a super-fabulous dehydrator on Sunday... Stay tuned...

I tried something new this weekend: dehydrating corn.  It couldn't be easier, just empty a bag of frozen corn onto the dehydrator trays, and let it go at 135°F overnight.  Easy peasy.  However, I was somewhat skeptical that the rehydrated product would be edible.  The dried corn resembled brittle yellow rocks, and looked suspiciously like birdseed.  I had a feeling it would be unbearably chewy and flavorless.

So I tried some corn chowder for dinner tonight, as an experiment.



Holy SMOKES it was good.  The corn came back to exactly the way it was before, sweet and flavorful.  I was quite pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong.

The recipe is one I cobbled together from several websites - cooking as well as food-storage sites.

-----------------------------------

Dehydrated Corn Chowder
4 servings

1/2 cup dehydrated sweet corn
1 1/2 cups water
4 strips bacon, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped fairly fine
2 cups water
1 medium potato, diced in 1/2 inch chunks
2 1/2 cups water
2 cups nonfat dry milk
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
several grinds of black pepper
1 tablespoon dried parsley

Rehydrate corn in 1 1/2 cups of water for at least 20 minutes. (I let it go an hour and a half because that was how long it was until I got home.)

Brown bacon in a large pot until crisp. Remove and drain. Saute onion in bacon fat until tender and remove to the bowl with the bacon.

Remove all bacon fat except for 2 tablespoons or less. Place the rehydrated corn and any leftover soaking water into the same pot used to cook the bacon and onions. Add two more cups of water. Boil for about 20 minutes, adding more water if necessary.  (I only had to boil it about 10 minutes since I soaked the dry corn so long.  The point is to make sure the corn is fully rehydrated and cooked.)

Add diced potato and cook until tender (took less than 10 minutes with 1/2" dice). Combine dry milk, flour, salt and pepper with 2-1/2 cups water and mix well. Add milk mixture to the pot and bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally. Add onions, bacon and dry parsley. Stir well and simmer for 5 minutes or so to thicken slightly.

Serve and watch it disappear!

---------------------------------------

Emma and I split a drained 6.5 ounce can of clams between our bowls when we went back for seconds.  It was awesome, and crab, lobster, scallops, or chicken would also be delicious.  Chowder is very flexible.  Next time, I think I would increase the amount of dry corn to 3/4 cup or even 1 cup, for even more corny goodness.  The critical ratio of corn to soaking water seems to be 1:3, though it probably doesn't matter as much for a soup.

Yum!

"Mom," said Emma, "when are you going to make some more fruit candy?"



Mangos on sale at the supermarket and strawberries from the Farmer's Market.  Last jar of 2011 plums (from our yard) pulled down from the top shelf.

Candy accomplished.  No added sugar, nothing but fruit.

Have I mentioned that I love my dehydrator?

I've been home a lot in the past couple weeks, since I had my hours at work reduced to zero (yes, again). I was limping long at 5-10 hours a week for a couple months before Christmas, then they said "sure, take two weeks off for the holidays, no problem", so we went to visit family. When we got back, I went into work on Monday Jan. 4, and was told that there is nothing for me to work on until probably March. Sigh.

Anyway, I've been home a lot. Hence the recorder obsession. And going to the gym every day. Which are not entirely useless pursuits, I suppose. Funnily enough, the laundry doesn't seem to be getting folded any faster even though I'm home more.

Onward to the point of this post! I did something today that I've always wanted to try. I candied orange peel.



That's three oranges worth of peel, and it is SO much better than the stuff from the grocery store! Super easy, too. I just peeled the oranges (with a vegetable peeler, so as not to get any of the white pith), cut the peels into pieces, and boiled them in one cup of water until tender. Then I added one cup of sugar and boiled until the syrup was mostly absorbed and the peels were almost translucent. I tossed them in a bit more sugar so they wouldn't stick together, and voila! They're sweet and a little bitter, and very powerfully orange-flavored. Quite nice; not overly sweet, and not gummy like the store-bought ones. I think it will be fabulous in quick bread.

I also have been playing with a new kitchen toy this winter:



I got myself a dehydrator in October, when I was given a large box of apples by a coworker. There were too many for Emma and me to eat before they spoiled, so I sliced and dried most of them. I also did tomatoes (again, excess from a coworker's garden), and several batches of beef jerky. The jerky was a huge hit with Emma and Shaun (and me) and disappeared in a blink.

After that box of apples was used up, I received another big box! Apparently, it was a good apple year in Mike's yard. I didn't think we needed more dried apples (since I'm the only one who will eat them), so I sauced the second box. I got my mom's old food mill when we were at Dad's house over Christmas, and spent a day processing them into yummy, yummy applesauce. I had 30 pounds of apples in that second box, and it made 10 quarts. I didn't even add any extra sugar, and Emma declared it was "the best applesauce I've ever eaten." That's a win.



So there it is: the remaining 6 quarts of applesauce (yes, we've gone through 4 quarts in two weeks...), a quart of dried tomatoes, two half-pints of candied orange peel, and a gallon of dried apples. Tucked away safely in my cupboard, and making me feel very smug.

Today, in addition to the orange peel, I started a batch of cranberries drying into craisins; just plunged into boiling water until they cracked, then soaked in orange juice and honey for an hour to sweeten them slightly before spreading them on the dehydrator trays. They've been in there four hours so far, and should be done before bedtime.